


A Little Bit Sus

by Anonymous



Series: What Happens On the Skeld Stays on the Skeld [2]
Category: Among Us (Video Game)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Body Horror Aliens, Brief Horror Content, Crewmate Shenanigans, F/M, Impostor Red (Among Us), Impostor Yellow (Among Us), M/M, Mild Smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 10:22:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29649900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: *Sequel to Fix the Lights, Blue*Red had everything a benevolent impostor could ask for: Friends, a human boyfriend, and an easy job as a security guard on board the Skeld, a ship that is relatively stable and drama free. All of this is about to get turned on its head when an SOS call from another ship leads the crew into a trap, forcing Red to oust himself to save his crew from a hostile impostor.With the secret of his true identity as a shapeshifting alien out and his partner injured and unconscious in the medbay, Red faces new challenges in the form of fear-driven hostility from crewmates he once considered friends and a complication in the form of Yellow, a young and inexperienced impostor who wants to join the crew as Red's protégé.His life on the Skeld can never go back to the way it was before, but can he salvage what he has left and get back in the good graces of his crewmates?
Relationships: Crewmate/Crewmate (Among Us), Crewmate/Impostor (Among Us)
Series: What Happens On the Skeld Stays on the Skeld [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2178780
Comments: 7
Kudos: 51
Collections: Anonymous





	1. Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

> Howdy guys! I’ve been working on this damn fic for a whole month and I’ve only got one chapter and a couple of incomplete parts to show for it. I’m hoping by just going ahead and posting the first chapter I can motivate myself to finish the next one faster. For those who haven’t read my other anonymous fic, Fix the Lights Blue, I recommend doing so first because this fic is a sequel and keeps continuity with it.
> 
> This fic will not be pure smut like its predecessor, though it will have some smutty parts in it from time to time. This is the fic I mentioned wanting to write at the end of FtLB that focuses more on the rest of the crew than on Blue and Red’s relationship. Hopefully this time I won’t be doing Purple and Cyan dirty by pushing them completely into the background the whole fic.
> 
> *THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS SOME BRIEF SMUT.*

The starport was crowded with the bustle of crewmates making their way from ship to ship. Red tried to keep his head down as he felt overly paranoid that someone from his previous ship might recognize him and decide to alert a guard of his presence. The odds of seeing them again so soon were fairly low since they were docked on one side of the port and he was heading towards the other, but he still felt this overwhelming feeling of dread like someone might be following him.

At first he worried it might be his ex. If he never saw that asshole’s face again he would be the happiest impostor in the galaxy, but he knew that his ex probably didn’t feel the same way. He’d tried to stop him from leaving, tried to apologize, but Red was still feeling like a shaky mess from his months long ordeal basically locked in a closet with only a chair for company and an occasional tray of food pushed under the door to keep him from starving to death. Red already had another ship lined up to take him, his previous captain had seen to that, but his ex begged him to no-show them and stay with him until they found someone who would take both of them. Like he still trusted him enough to be on a ship with him again...it was just wishful thinking on his part that Red would forgive him for telling the entire crew his most heavily guarded secret.

But no, whenever he looked over his shoulder he didn’t see him or anyone he recognized. No one was even paying him any mind as far as he was aware. He tried to make himself seem inconspicuous by buying a turkey sandwich from a vending machine and taking a moment to eat it on a bench, keeping an eye out for anyone who might be following him. He briefly considered finding a deserted hallway and venting his way towards his destination, but at the same time he didn’t want to chance that someone might see him. Hell, for all he knew maybe MIRA had the vents monitored with cameras or motion detectors to prevent people like him from using them.

He just had to keep pretending he was a normal human just a little while longer. Once he was on his new assignment, a rickety little supply hauler called the Skeld, he could relax. He’d have a smaller crew where no one knew him. He could start over and go back to pretending he was human with no suspicion. He would be safe and would be able to go back to doing security work just like he did on his previous ship before his (ex)boyfriend opened his mouth and everything went to shit.

Too bad he apparently would not even make it to the Skeld. Red froze in fear when an alarm went off at the checkpoint he’d just walked through. Fuck. He’d thought it was a metal detector. It was a bioscanner, and it was currently flashing a warning that it had just detected alien biology.

“Hands where I can see them!” security shouted at him.

Red held his hands up as guns were trained on him. He surveyed them and realized their standard issue sidearms could not actually hurt him, but getting shot would still not bode well for him. Impostor blood looked almost like human blood until it was exposed to the open air, in which case it became thicker and turned to a dark sludge, something that would be a dead giveaway that he wasn’t actually human.

“Come with us and don’t make any strange movements!” another guard ordered him.

Red could cry. He saw several people at the checkpoint watching him as he was taken away to a back room. He was almost there! He could actually see the Skeld from where they were standing. If he had just stuck to his original instinct and vented past the final checkpoint he would be boarding the ship any minute now. Instead he was going to be locked in a glass container and sold to a lab where he’d be dissected over and over again, his body allowed to regenerate so they could just keep cutting him open and experimenting on him until his body’s regeneration abilities became overtaxed and he died of shock, exhaustion, and multiple organ failure. He’d heard what kind of tortures befell his kind when humans caught them and every instinct that he fought against was telling him to eat the guards and run. Even if he did heed his instincts, there were too many of them. There was no way a skinny little twig like him could fight through all of them, even if they were woefully unprepared to fight an impostor.

He didn’t need to pretend to look scared from inside of his impostor proofed cell, he was sure his actual fear got the emotion across pretty well. He’d just finally been let out of a tiny, locked room with a chair and now he was in a tiny, locked room that didn’t even have any place for him to sit other than the floor. His only possession, a MIRA-provided tablet, was confiscated from him and a guard had it hooked up to a computer so he could look at all the data saved on it, no doubt thoroughly searching through his porn stash as well as any viewed web pages or photos or anything that could give them the evidence they needed that Red was an impostor. He had been smart enough not to keep any such thing saved on the tablet just in case it ever fell into someone else’s hands, so at least he knew he didn’t have to worry that he might find any evidence.

Red didn’t know how long he was in that cell before a pair showed up to check him. “This is him?” the one in charge, a man in a tan colored suit asked. He seemed to be the big boss of this starport if the fact that the guards saluting him upon his entrance was anything to go by. “He seems a little too scrawny to be an impostor, don’t you think?”

“The scanner doesn’t lie,” the guard replied. “The results clearly said...”

“The results can’t be trusted unless they can be easily replicated by another scan,” Tan said. “It’s new software. There’s still bugs to be worked out. Last week it triggered when a crewmate’s dog walked through the scanner.” He motioned towards his assistant, who procured a hand scanner from a bag and handed it to him. “I’ll just scan him again and find out for sure.”

“Step forward please, Paxton,” the guard instructed, using the name on Red’s forged identification file. “If that really is your name.”

Red got to his feet and stepped forward, knowing that sooner or later he was going to be found out anyway, and it would fare worse for him if he was uncooperative. He was almost shivering as Tan scanned him through the glass and looked over the results.

Tan’s scanner beeped and he looked at a screen that obviously displayed a positive result for impostor biology. Tan nodded. “Negative. He’s human.”

“Goddammit!” the guard swore. He turned to another guard. “Send a tech out to that scanner. Make sure it’s working properly so we don’t get anymore false positives!”

They let Red out without so much as an apology and left him alone in a room with Tan so he could get everything settled and be on his way. It wasn’t until there was no longer several inches of glass between the two of them that Red detected the unmistakable scent of another impostor...two of them, actually, his assistant keeping watch by the door to make sure no one walked by to eavesdrop.

“You’re not actually Tan, are you?” Red asked.

“No, I’m actually a janitor. Tan is actually still in his quarters right now. Luckily for you, today happens to be his day off and he never tells anyone his schedule,” the other impostor said. He wrote something down and passed it across the table. “Here’s a note for your new captain absolving you of your tardiness. I’m sure he’ll want to know where you are right now since the Skeld is slated for takeoff in just a couple of hours.”

“Shit, I’ve been in there for that long?” Red replied.

“I hope you don’t kill your crewmates with the same kind of carelessness that you navigate starports,” Not-Tan said sarcastically.

Red feigned a laugh and went on his way, the note tucked in his hip pouch. He didn’t bother to correct Not-Tan that he wasn’t on the hunt. He was merely hoping that this crew would go better than the last. If he was lucky he’d be the only impostor on board the ship and wouldn’t have to worry about navigating around another of his kind. It wasn’t until he was almost to the ship that he realized he never got his old tablet back, but he wasn’t about to go back for it. It was broken anyway. One of his previous crewmates had been using it as a coaster while he was in confinement and spilled coffee on it, so it no longer turned on. He should receive a new one as part of a standard issue once he reached the Skeld anyway.

Red was thankful for the note because holy shit did his new captain seem angry. He was aware that tardiness by several hours was probably not a good first impression for the guy who had gotten a glowing (albeit exaggerated) recommendation by his previous captain. Luckily Black and White seemed to accept the slip as an apology and allowed him onto the ship without any further trouble.

“Hey, back to work! We’re taking off in two hours and we want as much in place as we can just in case we hit turbulence!” Black shouted at two crewmates standing in the kitchen area, watching the drama unfold.

The smaller one in pink moved away from the counter fairly quickly and was back to work in a flash while the taller one in blue seemed a little more clumsy as he tried to busy himself. Red couldn’t help but stare at him as he hastily stacked cans in an overhead cabinet, failing to notice that one of them was haphazardly balanced on the shelf’s edge.

White waited for Black to leave the cafeteria to make sure everyone else was doing their part on the ship. “You know, there’s something off about this letter,” he said as he handed it back to Red.

“Oh?” Red replied.

“I’ve seen Tan’s signature three times today and this one looks slightly off.”

 _Fuck._ “He’s probably been signing things all day. Maybe his hand just hurts. I know mine starts to look a little weird after I’ve been signing a lot of paperwork.”

White nodded and if Red wasn’t mistaken he thought he saw a hint of what looked like suspicion in his expression, if only for a split second. “Yeah, that’s probably it. Alright, come with me, I’ll show you where the security room is and give you your admin privileges in the systems so you can access the cameras.”

“Oh, I’m gonna need a new tablet. My old one stopped working.”

“Alright, I can get you one of those too after orientation.”

Red was supposed to be following White to the security room, but he stopped by the kitchen and leaned against the counter on the way by. He got a good look at Blue’s face as his presence seemed to catch his attention. “That can is about to fall.”

Blue heeded his warning with quick enough reflexes to avoid the heavy can that almost landed on his head. He kept moving without waiting for a thanks, resuming his trailing of White, who was waiting for him in the doorway.

 _Oh no, he’s cute..._ Red thought as he made his way down the hall and away from Blue. Why did he have to find humans so goddamn attractive all the time?

 _Eleven months_ _later_

Blue so wished that the Skeld was large enough for private rooms because it would mean that he didn’t have to sneak around or keep a nervous eye out every time he just wanted to be intimate for a few minutes with one of his partners. Red reassured him that he would hear someone coming long before Blue did, but that still didn’t completely calm his nerves through the awkward blowjob he was currently getting in shields. Maybe he should have locked the door...yeah, that would have been a good idea.

“Relax, Blue. You’re not supposed to be this tense when someone’s giving you head,” Red pointed out.

“I’m sorry, it’s just that White walked in on me and Orange in the upper engine last week and I’m still kind of on edge,” Blue explained.

“White walks in on everyone. He’s got the worst fucking timing.” Red licked the tip of his dick and added. “Besides, everyone’s at dinner. Which is where we should be, so let’s hurry up or they really will come looking for us.”

The sharp, needle-like teeth slowly grazing his dick made him shudder and Red started purring. Normally impostors didn’t really purr, but he’d observed how the crew seemed to feel calmer whenever the ship’s cat made that sound and learned to imitate it for Blue to the same effect. Most sounds impostors made were vocal mimicry of other species that had gotten learned and passed down from impostor to impostor anyway to the point where what was a natural impostor sound and what had been picked up elsewhere was long lost to time.

“Are you at least close?” Red felt an involuntary tightening in Blue’s balls as he squeezed him with his spare hand. “Ooh. I think you are.” He wrapped several tongues around Blue and picked up the pace with his other hand stroking his own length poking out from between his legs. His hand was making a wet slicking sound as he pumped it, putting most emphasis towards the upper half where sensations were stronger.

“Shit,” Blue said through his panting.

Red was pleased at the crying whimpers from Blue’s mouth as he let go and released into the impostor’s mouth. Red continued pumping his fist, lubrication dripping from his dick in thick strings that reached towards the ground. He finally came with a strained groan, splattering the ground between Blue’s legs. Red pulled his hand off of himself. It was so wet with slick that it trailed between his fingers like clear webbing. Blue was laughing weakly now as he pulled the lower half of his environment suit back up and reattached it, clearly pleased with the outcome of this encounter.

“Alright. Pink said dinner would be ready about now, so we should get over there,” Red said as he stood up.

“Uh...you’re not going to clean that up?” he asked of the fairly obvious puddle on the floor.

“Nope,” Red replied. He hooked his fingers just under Blue’s helmet and pushed it off of him, gave him a kiss, and wiped his slick stained hand off across Blue’s face before shoving it back on slightly crooked.

“Why do I let you do this shit to me?” Blue asked. He pushed his helmet back and tried to wipe his face off with his sleeve.

“Because you’re my bitch,” Red replied.

“Hey, actually I’m Orange’s bitch,” Blue pointed out. “He’s just letting you borrow me.”

Red smelled lasagna wafting from the cafeteria long before it reached Blue’s considerably weaker human nose. He could similarly hear all of the commotion of nine crewmates and a cat in the room together having collective conversations. The noise would be too hard for Blue to make out more than a few words stringed together with another person’s conversation, but Red could actually focus enough to single out particular conversations: Brown telling a blushing Cyan that he loved her. Green teasing Black by dryly telling him she was filing for divorce because he had playfully insulted her. Lime doing a drum solo on White’s helmet while White asked him to please stop it in his distinctly smooth English accent. Pink shouting “Think fast!” before nailing Purple in the back of the head with a piece of burnt garlic toast he’d thrown from across the cafeteria.

“Alright, I’m here! You can all start worrying now!” Blue said as he entered the cafeteria with Red by his side.

“Blue! I’m glad you made it!” Orange shouted. “Now go get your king a beer!”

Blue couldn’t help but laugh at the audacity of his boyfriend’s demand. “You want one, Red?” he offered. Red merely glared at him. The last time he was invited to have “just one beer” at the crew’s Cinco de Mayo celebration, he got so wasted that he had vented in the middle of the cafeteria in front of White and forgot how to hold a tangible shape. “Just thought I’d ask,” he shrugged before heading off to the kitchen.

Once Red and Blue were settled with their trays of food and Blue and Orange both each had a beer, Black stood up to make an announcement. “Alright everyone, can I have your attention please?”

“No,” Lime replied, prompting the entire cafeteria to start laughing.

“Okay, we’ll come back to Lime’s blatant insubordination in a second, but first, I just wanted to let you all know that in exactly one month’s time, we will arrive at the Polus station.” There was a chatter of quick responses and everyone became quiet once more. “If any of you don’t plan on sticking around for the return journey, please submit your requests for transfer as soon as possible so that I can have them approved and ready when we get there.”

It was not uncommon for crewmates to decide they were sick of the people they had been stuck on a ship in space for a lengthy amount of time with to transfer either to Polus or a different ship also temporarily docking at Polus, but this particular crew had become fast friends over the course of a year.

Pink said it best when he said, “Do we have to? You guys are like the closest family I’ve ever had.”

“Well I have no plans to force any of you off my ship, so if you all want to stay, that’s fine by me,” Black replied.

Blue and Orange heard Red make a contented sigh at this announcement over his lasagna. “You sound relieved,” Orange pointed out.

“This is literally the first time I either haven’t been asked to leave my crew or don’t want to leave voluntarily,” Red admitted. “Usually I don’t like my crewmates enough to want to stick around or they think I’m asocial and don’t like me.” There was also the fact that his last crew had found out he was an impostor and gave him the option to leave or die, but he didn’t dare say this out loud where one of the crewmates who didn’t know he was an impostor might hear it.

“Hey, it’s their own loss if they never bothered to take any time to get to know you like we did,” Blue replied.

“If you know what he means,” Orange said into his beer. Blue looked offended and slapped him.

Pink’s sentiment seemed to be shared by everyone else. Lime wanted to stick around just to hang out with his buddy, White, some more. Blue wanted to stay on the Skeld because Orange and Red wanted to stay on the Skeld and Cyan wanted to stay because she didn’t want to leave her brother, which in turn provided further incentive for Brown to stay. Purple wanted to stay because literally everyone else was staying and he claimed he didn’t want to be the one weirdo that left, though in reality he just wanted to stay with them because he liked them as much as they liked him.

“No one’s leaving? You mean I’m going to be trapped on this ship with you weirdos for another year?” White said in mock disappointment.

“You can always transfer and we’ll all stay here without you,” Lime pointed out.

White laughed. “I couldn’t even if I did want to. I’m an admin. The only way for me to transfer is to ask MIRA directly, and it could take them a year to approve or deny it.”

“I have to admit, I’ve been in some pretty shit crews in my time and this is the only one where I actually felt welcome,” Orange stated.

“More than one? What’s the worst crewmate story you have, Orange?” Lime asked.

Orange tried to think of the best one. “Probably when I was stuck with some religious nut who tried to turn me straight and hook me up with our resident lesbian so that we didn’t end up in Hell, and every time we complained the admins told us that we were being discriminatory. You?”

“I got stuck with one guy I’m 99% certain was legally insane. I accidentally drank from his glass instead of mine so he tried to drown me in a bucket.”

“Jesus,” they heard Green mumble.

“I had a crew where almost everyone was racist once because the captain was absolute trash. The first time I ever took my helmet off and they realized I was Asian they just started calling me slurs and talking to me in broken English and fake Chinese,” Purple said. “I’m not even Chinese. My dad’s Korean and my mom’s Japanese and I never even set foot in either country because I lived in space my entire life.”

“I know this is probably not as bad in comparison with some of your stories, but one of my favorite things about this crew is that no matter what I make you guys, you’ll always eat it,” Pink said. “I had this one crew for six months where most of them were so picky they only let me make the same four meals over and over and they complained if I ever deviated from the recipe to try to make it interesting or something.”

“I like that you make a variety. I was really not expecting you to make Japanese curry last week,” Purple said.

“Hey, I was listening when you said you missed when your mom made it for you, so I figured I’d try to make it,” Pink shrugged.

“I guess I got lucky with my first crew then,” Blue said. “The worst thing I have to put up with you guys is that Lime actually thinks his antics are funny.”

The collective “OHHHH!” from the crewmates could be felt in other galaxies. Lime feigned offense. “Ouch. Maybe I should put in a request to transfer _you?”_

“Nah man, you know I’m only teasing.”

Pink noticed that Red was doing his typical silent lurker to the conversation thing where he looked like he wanted to participate but remained silent. “What’s your worst crew story, Red?”

He looked like he had been caught in the headlights of a truck and was about to find out if there was a heaven. _Probably when_ _my boyfriend and I got into an argument because I_ _told him I was_ _uncomfortable with him topping me when we had sex_ _,_ _so he told everyone I was an impostor and they dragged me to the airlock and tried to eject me_ _until he begged them to just lock me in an empty room_ _in isolation_ _for months instead_ _,_ Red thought to himself.

“I’m sure it’s not that interesting. Just a bunch of petty drama from other crewmates,” he actually said. Blue gave him a knowing look. He’d already heard the story of his previous crew and partner.

“Nah, come on. You have to have something,” Brown said.

Well, Red did actually have a few bad crewmate stories that didn’t require him to reveal that he was an impostor. Maybe he could think of a good one. “Well...there was this one time...”

“At band camp?” Lime interrupted. There was awkward silence before everyone who got that reference started laughing. Red was not one of them and he couldn’t help but think he was missing some human pop culture thing.

“Any story that starts with the sentence ‘there was this one time’ is automatically a good one,” White said.

“I had this crewmate who fucked another crewmate who wasn’t her boyfriend, got pregnant, and then tried to pass it off as her boyfriend’s baby, which she thought worked until it came time to stay or transfer and he told her that he’d had a vasectomy and then walked off the ship without her and was never heard from again.”

“Damn, so much drama happens in space!” Orange said.

“Oh wait, it gets better,” Red replied. “They wouldn’t let me transfer because they couldn’t find a replacement security officer, so I got stuck with them on the return journey. She decided to date the baby’s real dad and then got pregnant _again,_ and then nine months later I had to stop him from beating our communications engineer to death with a wrench when the baby looked more like him than his supposed father.”

“And here you didn’t even think that would be interesting,” White replied.

“And you got stuck on a ship with two newborn babies,” Blue said sympathetically. “No wonder you hate kids so much.”

“Oh my god, all the money in the world couldn’t keep me on that ship any longer once we reached port. They offered to make me an admin and increase my pay grade, but I literally told them fuck no and walked off without waiting for the transfer to approve.”

“As far as crews go, I’m just glad that I didn’t have to space another impostor on this trip,” Black said.

“I am too,” Brown said with what sounded like extreme relief.

 _I make three,_ Red kept to himself. Though he was concerned about the usage of the word “another”...

“Alright everyone, finish up your dinner and get some sleep. Tomorrow we have to start prep tasks for our arrival at Polus,” Green shouted.

“This is always the worst part,” White said with disgust.

* * *

White’s coffee was finally cool enough for him to drink it, which was good because he was feeling tired from all the late shifts he’d been pulling to prepare for the moment where they arrived on Polus to exchange their cargo. He currently sat in one of the chairs in navigation, the other one occupied by Lucky, the ship’s feline mascot. His feet were propped up on the console in the exact same manner that he knew would have Black yelling at him if he were to see him doing it. Just because he was a ship admin didn’t mean he didn’t also do things he wasn’t supposed to.

This part of the job was always the most boring and he had _The Dark Side of the Moon_ playing through the speakers of his helmet just to have something to listen to that wasn’t silence. He preferred his other admin tasks such as making sure everyone else was doing their own tasks and doing them properly, keeping track of where everyone was so that he knew they weren’t goofing off during work hours, and monitoring that everything on the ship was running and working properly. Previously his tasks also secretly included keeping an eye on a suspected impostor, but now that he had confirmed Red was in fact an impostor he was relieved to have observed that he was also relatively harmless.

He was pouring over his tablet and checking boxes when the navigation console started beeping. He removed his feet from the console and sat upright, pausing midway through “Brain Damage” and bringing up the flashing alert on the monitor. Opening the attached encrypted message, he looked in shock as he read the contents.

“Hey boss?” he said over his direct comm line to Black.

He didn’t answer right away and White could only imagine he was scrambling to get to his helmet to respond. “Is this important?” Black replied in irritation. White could hear Green huffing and panting in the background and had an idea what he had just interrupted. His dark gift of horrendous timing struck again.

“It’s kind of important,” White replied. “We just received an SOS from a nearby ship.”

He was unsure if Black was intentionally ignoring him or not but finally he heard him reply, “Give me about twenty minutes.”

“Klayton, get off the fucking comms!” Green impatiently shouted at her husband in the background before the line went completely dead.

White looked at the cat. Lucky was staring back at him with creepy, glowing eyes illuminated by the monitors. “You’re lucky you’re a cat. You don’t realize how much our crew are a bunch of weirdos.”

The vent cover flipped open and Red crawled out of it in a shapeless blob form dragging itself along by muscular tendrils. “Hey, White. Just going for a walk,” Red said through sounds of distortion before casually crawling into the opposite vent. “Also don’t be concerned if you start to smell something coming from the vents. I’ve got some raw hamburger ripening in here. It tastes so much better when it’s green and got a thick layer of slime on it.”

“Exhibit A,” White concluded. Lucky meowed and started licking her paw. “Hey Red. Come back here a second. I want you to look at this.”

The massive blob of dark red oozed its way back out of the vent. It almost looked like the floor was giving birth to a giant slime mold. “What’s up?” Red asked.

“We got an SOS. I already alerted Black, but since you’re our head of security, I wanted to get your opinion on this.”

“Did you want to get security’s opinion on this, or an impostor’s?”

“I guess both,” White admitted.

There was no law that said that you absolutely had to respond to an SOS in space, however it was considered a common courtesy to do so. After all, you wouldn’t want to be ignored if your own ship needed help, so why keep blowing past it when someone else did? Still, something about this SOS didn’t sit right with White. No one returned any attempts at communication, which meant there likely wasn’t anyone left who could work the comms, which left a high probability that there might be a high number of casualties on the ship, and there were few reasons that White could think of for that being the case: a pandemic disease, a violent mutiny, the ship’s functionality was compromised, impostor infestation...

“Well?” he asked Red.

“Don’t answer the call. Just keep heading for Polus,” Red instructed him.

“Does it seem that suspicious to you too?” White asked. “Pirates maybe?”

“No,” Red shook his head. “This area is governed by MIRA. If there are any pirates lurking around I’d be pretty surprised. I’m more worried that this sounds like a classic case of a ship wiped out by impostors.”

White nodded. “I was worried about that too. But I also wondered what if they got it under control? What if there’s a human being on that ship left alive and he’s helpless and in need of a rescue?”

“What if that person is an impostor trying to board our own ship?” Red pointed out.

“Can you personally tell other impostors apart from humans?” White asked.

“Yes,” he nodded. “We notice subtle behavioral tics and have a very distinctly earthy scent from humans, so we can immediately tell if the person we’re talking to is one of our own.”

“Then we’ll just have to let you meet anyone we find.”

“I can do that, my only concern is whether or not they’re even interested in meeting us. Sometimes an impostor might lure others onto a ship and then do a consume and replace, and I really don’t want to find out that one of my friends is now dead and replaced by a hostile impostor.”

“So is your opinion against helping them then?” White asked.

Red shook his head. “Honestly I don’t know what I’d suggest. Maybe wait for Black so he can offer his own opinion.”

When Black finally made it to them, they looked over the data received in the SOS together. Black rhythmically tapped the front of his helmet with a finger. “Who is the ship logged to?”

“Well let’s see…” White checked the ship’s info and uttered, “Bollocks...it’s a MIRA owned ship. We have to rescue it.”

There may not have been a law, but MIRA did have a rule that dictated that you must save MIRA owned ships upon receiving an SOS from them, even if it was obvious that it was an impostor trap. It was less about helping the personnel and more about recovering potentially valuable cargo, because when it came to people, MIRA didn’t give much of a shit.

“I guess that decides it for us, then,” Black said. He sounded just as displeased with this as White did. “How soon until we reach the other ship?”

“About a day or so,” White replied.

“Alright. I guess we’re taking a quick detour. Once we get there I want all hands on deck. Everyone who is combat capable is to report to the airlock.”

“Everyone?” Red asked.

“Yes, everyone.”

“Even...Blue?” He almost mumbled his words as though he were nervous saying them.

“Yes, even Blue. Who else would that entail, White?”

“Uh...” White looked over his crewmate profiles in his tablet. “Everyone on the Skeld has some degree of training in combat except for Cyan and Brown.”

“Pink has combat proficiency?” Red asked.

“Well I would hope so. He’s a retired space marine. He’s served eight years in active combat.”

Red was genuinely surprised. He never knew that, which was strange considering he knew pretty much everything about his crewmates that he wasn’t supposed to due to his instinctive spying habits. He guessed he had just always assumed that cooking was his only major skill. Impostors tended to learn one thing and then stick with it, which made them cripplingly underspecialized when trying to blend in with a human crew, and he often forgot that humans often possessed more than one stagnant skill.

“Alright. Well there’s no sense in waking the crew for this now, so we’ll make an announcement tomorrow and deal with it then. Until then, chart a course for that ship,” Black instructed.

“Got it,” White nodded.

“Got it,” Red agreed.

He turned his head towards White, and though the reflection of light off the monitors made it impossible for them to see the other’s expression through the visors of their helmets, he knew that White had the same concerned expression that he did.


	2. Screams in the Void

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The crew of the Skeld investigate the SOS from a derelict ship called the Knight. Unfortunately they realize fairly quickly that they have just wandered into a trap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter might be a good time to tell you guys that I’m actually not a smut writer, I’m a sci-fi/horror writer. I had a lot of fun getting to write and share my horror content again, but I promise you the entire fanfic isn’t going to be like this and is going to focus more on humor and character development.
> 
> So a bit of a content warning that there’s some graphic descriptions of corpses in this chapter. There also might be typos. I rewrote this entire chapter from scratch in the three hours I had before work from some notes and didn’t have a chance to proofread, so I’ll do that when I get home and correct any mistakes I might notice. Until then, enjoy the read. I hope it doesn't come off as too rushed because I had to crunch around the ending in order to finish before I had to leave for work.

The power on board the Knight had been completely knocked off, whether due to sabotage or neglect to the care of the ship’s electrical grid, it was too soon to tell. Only some of the emergency lights were working, plunging most of the ship into complete darkness. Flashlights turned on the instant everyone set foot on the ship. Red almost forgot to switch his on. He didn’t need it to see, but it would probably look suspicious if he didn’t turn it on and instead navigated expertly through the dark without it.

He listened for any sounds, a rustling in the vents, footsteps in another room, anything, but there was nothing. It was dead silent. Silence on a ship was not a good thing. There was always something making a sound, whether it was the subtle rumble of air rushing through a vent or the gentle _whoosh_ of a pneumatic door depressurizing, it was never completely silent. The silence meant that something was very seriously wrong.

“You know Black, it’s not too late for us to just turn back around and leave,” Red suggested. “The ship will have logged that we answered the SOS if MIRA checks.”

“I want to say yes, but I just know someone’s going to question why we only spent about ten minutes investigating,” Black replied. He turned to the crewmates waiting for the all clear to enter the ship. “Alright. No one goes anywhere alone and keep your comms on and clear in case anyone needs to call for help.”

“Yes sir,” they all replied.

Red grabbed Blue by the hand and dragged him closer to his side. “You come with me,” he ordered him. “Let’s see if we can get the grid back online.” He nodded for Orange to also follow him and signaled Black that they were heading to electrical before leaving.

“I take it that you also think that something is seriously fucking wrong?” Orange asked.

“I smell something off and I don’t like it,” Red replied.

“Could it be that?” Blue suggested. “Because whatever that is, it smells really bad.”

There was something laying in a heap on the floor in a puddle of blackened stagnant water that had poured out of a burst pipe. Red crept closer and rolled it over. It was a body in an advanced state of decomposition, probably dead for about a month. His suit was torn open around his abdomen and his insides had turned black from rot. In one hand he was clutching a semi-automatic pistol that was out of bullets. The hole in the side of his helmet suggested that the last round in the clip had ended his suffering.

“Black, we just found a body,” Red reported. He sounded remarkably calmer than Blue was right now and he could hear him dry heaving behind him.

“Goddamn, we’re looking at one right now too,” Black’s voice said over the comm. “Ours hung himself. What state is your body in?”

“Looks like something tore him open. I think he survived the initial attack and then took his own life to stop the pain.”

“Fuck. We’ve got an impostor,” Black concluded.

Red switched his comms back to idol. “That is exactly what I’m thinking.” He looked at Blue. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to let him hurt you.”

“Let’s just try to get the power back up as quickly as possible. You know where we’re going?” Orange asked.

“White gave me a copy of the ship’s layout,” Red nodded. “Electrical is located right over here.”

The door was jammed in a partially shut state. Orange wedged himself in between the narrow gap and pushed as hard as he could until it started to budge. Tentacles wrapped around the edge and helped pry it in its track until it slid back far enough to let the three of them in.

“Thanks,” Orange said while Red retracted his tentacles.

“There’s a bad smell in here too,” Red observed.

Electrical was splattered with rust colored stains. Crumpled in a heap on the floor were two rotting carcasses that were barely recognizable as human. They’d been eaten, leaving behind a scattered mess of slime covered bones and meat so putrid that a vulture would have turned its head. Red figured that one of them must have been ambushed trying to get the power back up. The other might have stumbled in on the impostor eating and was killed and eaten too. That was just a hunch though. He couldn’t tell for sure without being there.

“Oh my god,” Blue said when he saw the state of the bodies.

“Don’t focus on the bodies. Just focus on the power,” Red instructed. He pushed him past them, aware that the sounds squishing underfoot were him stepping in the remains of long dead crewmates.

Blue looked at the electrical box to restart the generator. There were no indicator lights lit. He pushed a few buttons and flipped switches but there was no response. “Guys, it’s dead,” he said with a sinking feeling.

“What do you mean, it’s dead? You can’t jumpstart it?” Orange asked.

“No. It’s completely dead. There’s no way for me to restart the power.” He realized the cover to the box was loose when he pushed on it and watched it rattle. Prying it off, he found that the box had been tampered with. Several fuses were missing. “Whoever did this did not want the ship’s power to come back on.”

“We need to get off this ship,” Red suddenly said. The other two looked at him and saw he had his tentacles out again and was staring at the vent. “The impostor that did this wasn’t killing people slowly over the course of several weeks. He wiped an entire crew out in probably less than 48 hours. We do not want to fuck with this guy.”

“Black, Red says we need to get off this ship,” Orange said. “We found more bodies and we can’t restart the power.”

“Pink and Purple found someone,” White replied. “They ran off after her. We’re trying to catch up to them.”

Blue and Orange had never seen Red sound so scared when he screamed into the comms, “PINK, PURPLE, STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM HER!”

It was too faint for Blue and Orange to hear but Red was able to pick up on the sound of Pink screaming. Without giving either of them any warning he dove into the vent and disappeared.

_Ten minutes earlier_

“Stay with me, big guy. This place is freaking me the fuck out,” Pink requested.

Purple nodded and stayed by his side while the two of them examined some scratches in the wall. Whatever had damaged the wall had to have an enormous amount of strength. The scratches were at least three feet in length and were an inch deep through metal plating.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Purple stated. “Hang on, let me take some pictures.”

Pink watched him get out his tablet and input his password before taking photos of the wall. “Purple?”

“Yeah, Pink?”

“Is your password ‘12345’ by any chance?”

“Yeah,” Purple replied. “Is that bad?”

“Purple, you’re our tech guy!”

“So that’s a yes?”

“Do these remains look human to you guys?” White asked.

Lime, Green, and Black gathered around the rancid blob of flesh that was laying out on the ground. It almost looked (and smelled) like decomposing whale fat that had washed onto a beach.

“Doesn’t look human to me,” Green replied. “Looks like someone got a lucky shot in on their assailant.”

Pink indicated the scratches on the wall behind him. “Looks like they got lucky more than once. I doubt he was aiming for the wall.”

“Yeah well, their luck must have run out at some point, otherwise we’d probably be rescuing them right now instead of investigating their deaths,” Lime pointed out.

“Who’s there?” Purple suddenly shouted.

Everyone looked down the hallway where he was shouting. “You hear something, big guy?” Pink asked him.

Purple was silent. “I thought I heard something, yeah.” He took a few steps down the hallway but didn’t go far. “Hello?”

Pink stood right next to him. Their flashlights illuminated nothing but debris from an electrical panel that had overloaded and exploded around a month ago. They were both starting to look around for a potential vent when the heard footsteps and looked up just in time to see what looked like a girl in a yellow environment suit running from them.

“Hey, wait!” Pink ran after her.

“Pink! Don’t run off!” Purple shouted before chasing after him.

“What the fuck are you guys doing?” Black shouted after them.

Purple was easily able to keep up with Pink as they both raced down the hall and turned corners after her. After a while they realized that they had lost her and had no idea where she had even gone. Come to think of it, where the fuck were they? The Knight was enormous. Their ship was just a dinky little supply hauler, but the data that White was able to extract about the Knight indicated it was three times the size of the Skeld and had more than three times the personnel to boot.

Pink and Purple both quickly turned and looked at the wall when they heard a noise in the vent. They looked relieved when they saw it was just a bunch of rats running by. Pink disconnected his flashlight and moved closer.

“What are you doing?” Purple asked.

“Just looking,” Pink replied.

“You’re looking in the vent for the girl?”

“Why not? She looked scared. Maybe she doesn’t want to hurt us?”

“Maybe it’s a ruse,” Purple warned.

Pink went to move the cover only for the whole thing to fall and dangle from a single screw. He leaned inside of the narrow vent and shown his flashlight down the shaft where the rats had disappeared. It was completely empty. He heard what sounded like movement behind him and turned around, expecting more rats.

What he saw instead was a massive blockage inside the vent that looked like a carnivorous plant, only it was made out of meat. Pink suddenly realized his mistake. He had thought that the presence of the rats meant the vent was safe. It was only now that he realized that the rats were fleeing. A massive maw full of thick teeth opened up and tentacles spilled out of it towards him. Pink screamed as he jerked back out of the vent, only to be grabbed and pulled back in.

“PINK!” Purple shouted.

He grabbed Pink and pulled him back away from the mouth of the vent, fighting against the strong grip that had him. Pink was a small guy, but the vent was even smaller. He’d be seriously injured, possibly even killed, if he were to be dragged inside. He _would_ be killed if he were dragged inside, he reminded himself. The impostor would fucking eat him.

Pink put one of his feet on the side of the vent and tried to push himself away from it. He screamed when he felt a sharp pain run through his leg as one of his bones started cracking from the pressure.

There was a sound from a vent behind them and Pink panicked when more tentacles wrapped around his body. He soon realized they were pulling him away and he felt the tentacles from the vent loosening before he was released. Pink, Purple, and the helpful impostor all fell to the floor in a heap. Purple immediately dragged Pink away from the second impostor and held him close, as though shielding him with his arms. It looked at them, tilting its head. If they couldn’t be mistaken, its expression seemed concerned for them.

There was something about that look in its eyes that reminded Pink of someone. It looked almost lost, like an outsider desperately trying to fit in. “R-Red?” he said as he fought back against choked sobs.

Red looked back at the vent as the other impostor emerged and quickly put himself between his crewmates and the monster. It took a while for it to completely drag itself out of the tight space. The impostor was three times Red’s size and towered over him. It looked vaguely like a massive rat hovering over its prey. There were broken and splintered bones sticking out of one of its sides, the remains of a human corpse it was digesting most likely, and its cancerous looking flesh was tinted a sickly gray color. As it looked at Red’s smaller, more emaciated appearance, it clearly was not impressed.

Red heard Purple muttering, “Oh my god, it looks like something from Parasite Eve!”

“What the fuck is Parasite Eve?” Pink asked.

“You really don’t want to know right now!”

“Well now, what the fuck is this?” the impostor asked, its language unintelligible to humans but perfectly understandable to another impostor like Red. “A scrawny little pipsqueak defending humans? I never thought I’d see something like that.”

“Get the fuck away from my crewmates,” Red said in English.

“Oh how cute, and now it’s challenging me.”

There was shouting from down the hall as the others started to catch up. “Pink! Purple!”

The enemy impostor casually glanced down the hall. “Oh, looks like your friends are here. Guess it’s time for me to go,” he shrugged before sprinting off down on the hall on four legs.

“Get back here!” Red shouted before chasing off after him. There was no way in hell he was letting him go until all his crewmates were together and accounted for.

Purple was cradling Pink in his arms as White and Lime caught up to them. “That was Red…” Purple said. “Red’s an impostor?”

White looked uncomfortable. He looked to Lime and then to the pair shivering against the wall in terror. “Yes,” he replied. “Red is an impostor.”

Lime’s head whipped around. “Say _what?”_

* * *

“I want to go back to the ship,” Blue said. Orange started to say something but he quickly interrupted him. “I want to go back to the ship! Right now!”

It was clear that Blue was starting to lose it, and Orange couldn’t blame him. He’d never experienced a hostile impostor before. He’d heard about them and knew what they were capable of but his only hands on experience with them was Red, who looked scary but was actually a teddy bear at heart. Seeing so many corpses in such an advanced state of decay could not be easy on his mental health either.

“Alright. We’ll go back to the ship now,” Orange reassured him. “Black, we’re heading back.”

“No! Stay where you are and hide! We’ll come to you!” Green ordered them.

“Don’t tell them to stay where they are, they should be getting their asses back on the ship!” Lime interrupted.

“Do not undermine me, Lime!”

“Lime’s right. Hiding isn’t going to do shit,” White interrupted.

“What the fuck is going on?” Orange said. He tried to pull Blue towards the ship but he was frozen in place and his legs just would not move. “Blue, come on!”

“Behind you...”

Orange slowly turned his head. Tentacles were emerging from a sagging ceiling vent, spilling out like guts as a massive _thing_ fell out of it. It was not Red.

It reconstituted itself, multiple eyes all focusing on the pair in front of it, limbs, of which they counted at least six, folding against its sides or propping its body up on the ground. Tentacles started to spill from its primary mouth, filtering through its teeth like fresh vomit, and it was drooling thick ropes of saliva from the gigantic maw on its chest.

It lunged for Orange. He felt something shove him to the floor and felt his heart sink when he heard Blue scream in agony. Blood sprayed all over the walls and floor and it was then that Orange realized the thing had his boyfriend’s arm and was biting through the thin armor on his suit.

“Let go of him!” Orange screamed before jumping on its face. The impostor regarded him like one would an annoying mosquito. Tentacles wrapped around Orange’s waist and he was thrown to the side.

The sounds of claws rapidly clicking on the floor proceeded Red jumping onto the enemy impostor’s back. Orange expected his attack to be as effective as his own and was already mentally shutting down as he prepared for the worst, that he was going to watch his boyfriend die knowing that he couldn’t do anything to save him. Instead the impostor released Blue in a heap on the floor and clawed the air at the smaller impostor on its back.

“GET OFF ME!” the impostor screamed.

Orange realized that Red was tearing into him, pulling out chunks of whatever he could grab and tossing them over his shoulder onto the floor. Tentacles were wrapped around him to try and stop him but had little effect as Red fought against him.

“Get away from my partner!” Red hissed at him.

The impostor laughed. “So that’s why he smells like you,” he said. “You’re one of _those_ kind of impostors with a fetish for humans.” He flipped Red off his back and slammed him onto the floor. “Since you seem to be so concerned about these humans, you can die with them!”

The larger impostor had strength on his side, but Red was smaller and faster and able to run circles around him as he tried to catch up to him with his slower reflex time. While Red had him distracted, Orange ran to Blue’s side and tried to drag him out of the fight.

Blue was in shock and hyperventilating as blood poured from his mangled arm. Punctures went all the way down to exposed bone and Orange could see snapped tendons and separated muscle. He quickly made a tourniquet to stop the bleeding as Blue slowly started to drift in and out of consciousness. He heard footsteps as the others caught up to them. Purple was carrying Pink who also looked injured, just not as badly as Blue was right now.

“Holy fuck!” Lime shouted when he saw the two impostors fighting it out in the hall.

“Red, look out!” White shouted.

Red was slammed against the wall. He quickly bounced back and sprinted around to the impostor’s opposite side, biting off a tentacle that reached for him. He looked at his crewmates and realized he had to get this impostor away from them. He ran, hoping he would take the bait. He did. The massive impostor ran after him.

“Fleeing won’t get you very far, shrimp!” the impostor yelled after him.

Red knew he was right. He couldn’t outrun him for long and he wasn’t strong enough to fight him off, but he did have one thing to his advantage: He was very resourceful. He just had to come up with another way to kill off this impostor.

Stagnant water splashed underfoot. Many of the halls were flooded with it due to multiple bursts in the piping giving the ship a strong smell not unlike sewage. Impostors were resilient to most types of damage, but there were three things they were exceptionally vulnerable to: Acid, extreme heat, and high voltages of electricity. Unfortunately the electrical was out...but wait, not completely. The main power was off, but as the emergency lighting showed, there was some power still left in that ship. He just had to figure out how to...bingo!

Some wires answered Red’s prayers. One of them was sparking, indicating that it was hooked up to whatever backup energy source was powering the emergency lights. Red jumped up onto the wall and clung to the piping and waited. He heard the impostor thundering up the hall before he saw him. He flipped over a cart and scattered the computer and files on top of it to the floor before smashing into a metal crate and sending it flying. It splashed into a large puddle of stagnant water.

“Gave up running already?” he asked when he spotted Red.

“No. Just decided to try something different,” he replied. He tore the wiring down from the clasps that held it off the ground and dropped it into the water.

The impostor was huge, but the electrical current was strong enough to stop it in its tracks. It made a high pitched screeching sound as it convulsed. The emergency lighting flickered and then cut off completely, plunging the rest of the Knight into perpetual darkness.

Red did not see anymore movement as the massive impostor collapsed on the ground. It made no sound nor any attempts to get back up again. He almost fell off the wall himself as he got back down onto the ground. It wasn’t until now that he realized how badly hurt he was.

His only thought was that he needed to get back to his crew. He had to make sure that Blue was okay! He limped down the hallway, dragging limp tentacles across the debris laying on the ground and leaving streaks of black, tarlike blood behind.

It hadn’t taken him long to get there but as his wounds started to catch up to him and he could now feel the pain that he had been repressing, he couldn’t go really fast at all anymore. The flashlight beams and sounds of voices were a welcome relief as he got closer.

“Stay back!” Green shouted when she saw him.

Red stopped, his body hunched over and shaking. His blood bubbled in thick, congealed blobs around his wounds and he was missing one of his primary eyes. “Is Blue okay?” he asked before vomiting up more tar and collapsing on the ground.

Lime took a step back from Red. “What the fuck!” he said when he watched him. “How long has that fucking thing been an impostor?”

“Don’t call him a thing, Lime!” Orange said angrily.

“What’s going...on,” Blue mumbled before completely passing out in Orange’s arms.

Lime looked angrily at White. “You knew about this, didn’t you? And you didn’t even warn anybody!”

“Wait, you knew that Red was an impostor?” Black asked.

White looked uncomfortable again. “I knew,” he replied. “I think I always knew from the moment I met him.”

“And you just decided to keep this to yourself?” Green said angrily.

“Hey, I knew too!” Orange interrupted. “Let’s worry about this later and get the fuck back on our ship before my boyfriend bleeds to death, okay?”

“What about Red?” Pink asked.

“Fuck him! Leave his ass here with the other one!” Lime replied.

White expected to hear Orange protest, but he wasn’t expecting it from Pink and Purple. “We are not abandoning him on a derelict ship!” Purple shouted at him. “He’s coming with us!”

“He’s an impostor!”

Pink snapped, “I don’t give a fuck if he’s Puff the Magic Dragon, he saved my life! Fuck, he saved Blue’s!”

“Everyone calm the fuck down!” Black shouted at them all.

Cyan’s voice cut through their comms. “Guys, what’s going on? All we can hear is a lot of shouting over the comms and it’s freaking Brown and me out!”

“Cyan, we’re going to need you to prep some tables for emergency medical,” Black informed her.

“What? Is anyone dead?” Cyan said. She managed to stay strong enough to avoid the tears, something that made her excellent for handling emotionally damaging patients, but there was still an air of fear in her voice.

“No one’s dead Cyan, but we do have critical injuries.”

Orange reluctantly dove into the conversation. “Cyan, sweetie, Lucas is badly hurt.”

There was an extended silence before Cyan asked, “How hurt?” This time her voice did crack a little, as was expected of anyone who just found out their brother had been injured.

Orange did not want to admit that he was worried his boyfriend might lose his arm, so instead he said, “Very bad. Be prepared for what you’re going to see when we bring him in.”

“How many beds do we need to prep?” It was Brown asking this time.

“Two,” Black replied.

“Three,” White said insistently.

“Two!” Black repeated.

White glared at their captain and stepped confrontationally into his personal space. “Three!”

Normally such insubordination would have earned a suitable punishment if it had been anyone but White doing it, but White commanded such a firm respect from the rest of the crew that even Black seemed slightly intimidated at his insistence.

“Prep three beds,” Black finally answered.

“You can’t be serious,” Lime said.

“You heard him,” Orange replied. “Now back off!”

Lime continued to stare Orange down before finally relenting. Lime was a pretty small guy, only slightly taller and heftier than Pink, and Orange was probably the biggest guy on the crew, more muscular and only slightly shorter than Black himself. He knew better than to pick a fight with him, especially when he was emotionally unstable.

“Okay,” he replied. “You want to bring a monster onto the Skeld? Be my guest. Just don’t come crying to me for help when it’s eating you!”

“He,” Orange insisted. “And I think I’ll manage just fine.”

Carefully White picked Red up in his arms. He went completely limp and White worried that he had died while they were bickering over his fate, but the tentacle that crawled up his chest and wrapped around his shoulder to hold on gave a reassuring nudge that he was still alive.

“Get out fast,” Red warned him before passing out. “I don’t think it’s dead, just unconscious.”

While the crew was bickering over Red’s fate, none of them noticed a small figure slithering out of the vents. It looked at them suspiciously before making its way towards the airlock and slipping onto the Skeld, immediately darting into the ventilation before it could be spotted. None of them were any the wiser.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I have short character profiles for all of the characters in this continuity and I’ve been rereading them and laughing my ass off because they include random irrelevant character trivia in them all. Thought maybe I’d share them with you so you can see what I mean and maybe learn something about the characters that I might not include in the story itself, starting with the obvious choice of Blue. I also included some behind the scenes “additional” notes about the creation of the characters themselves.
> 
> Blue, Real Name: Lucas, Details: Hispanic/Earthborn (American), 35 yo, Gay  
> Occupation: Electrical Technician  
> Random Facts: Once rigged a Christmas light display to be visible from the next town over to get back at a neighbor that complained about the lights he had on his bushes being too bright. Is secretly a scaly; his fursona is a blue monitor lizard. Once made the mistake of offering Red a blowjob while he was in heat and almost choked to death.  
> Additional Notes: “Blue” was chosen for the color of the main character because it’s my favorite color. I didn’t really have much of a character in mind for him at first since Fix the Lights Blue (the fic) was meant to be a side piece written on a whim while I worked on a far more serious and gory, horror themed Among Us fic and the positive attention to it made it become the primary fic while my other fic still hasn’t seen completion or the light of day. Such is art.


	3. Only Nightmares

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Red's status as the Skeld's resident impostor is now common knowledge. Cyan has to deal with the fact that her brother is critically injured while the crew decides what to do with Red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just gonna point out that I have an unofficial soundtrack that goes along with this fanfic while I write it, and the song for this chapter is Clocks by Coldplay, which happened completely by accident...I heard the song playing today while I was waiting in the queue for my lunch at Wawa and it's been stuck in my head ever since while I worked on this chapter, so now it's an official part of the soundtrack.
> 
> This is another angsty chapter, but I promise the next chapter is gonna have some humor in it.

_Eight months ago..._

“Red, get out of the bathroom!” Cyan shouted.

“No!” Red replied. “I’m not done!”

“You’ve been in there for an hour now. If you need an hour to go to the bathroom then maybe you really do need to go to the medbay!”

“No!” he shouted again.

“Red, seriously now...” Cyan said in exasperation. “I know you’re not actually going to the bathroom and the reason I know is because you didn’t have to go until I told you it was time for your monthly medical checkup.”

“I don’t need it!” he protested.

He’d been hiding in the end stall in the bathroom and shivering for an hour now. Impostors did not need to use the bathroom, of course. Anytime he ate something that couldn’t be digested and absorbed into his biomass he just waited until no one was around and regurgitated it into the trash compactor. He just didn’t want to be put on the scanner so that Cyan couldn’t find out he didn’t have human biology. He’d managed to avoid getting a routine checkup thus far and it was getting harder and harder to avoid it the more that he put it off.

“You’ve been disappearing and skipping out on every single one of your checkups since we took off from the starport. You are months overdue. Now get out here!”

He hissed at her and then realized he probably shouldn’t have done that. Humans didn’t hiss. That was solely an impostor thing. Impostors and cats and also snakes and sometimes crocodiles, but never humans. Crap...maybe he gave himself away?

“Red, open the door now!” Black demanded. Oh great, now the captain was getting involved.

“No! You’re going to yell at me!” Red replied.

“I’m yelling at you right now! Open the door!”

“I can get him out,” Orange offered. Oh great, and now his rival for Blue’s affections was getting involved. As though he didn’t already detest the man enough.

Cyan sounded desperate to try anything at this point. “Please do.”

The stall door creaked when Orange slammed all of his body weight onto the lock. Red’s muscles became stiff as he quickly thought up a solution. Once he heard the lock snap, he realized there was only one more option. Orange got the door open just in time to see Red scramble onto the top of the toilet tank and then up to the very top of the stall.

“The fuck?” Orange said “How did you get up there so fast?”

“Stay away from me!” he shouted before climbing onto the pipes. They creaked and he hoped that they would be strong enough to hold his dense weight. He was careful to stick to the thicker ones knowing that the thin, slender ones would no doubt snap underneath him and spray everyone below with hot water.

From up here he could see that a sizable crowd of crewmates was gathering just inside the bathroom doorway by now. With hardly anything to do now that everyone’s tasks were done for the day, everyone was finding entertainment in watching Orange as he grabbed a broom and started poking and swatting at Red as he climbed across the pipes like Spider-Man.

“Red, it’s just a routine medical checkup! It’s not like she’s going to stick a thermometer up your ass or anything!” Orange said before jabbing at him again with the bristly end of the broom. “Wait, you’re not going to do that, are you?”

Cyan looked annoyed that he’d even suggest this. “No. All he needs to do is get his ass on the scanner.”

“That’s it? Seriously, Red? You’re afraid of a bioscanner?”

He very well couldn’t tell anyone the real reason he was afraid of the scanner, so he came up with an excuse that seemed plausible. “I heard those things can cause cancer and I’m not taking any chances!”

“Honestly, I’m a little impressed with his balance,” White admitted. Cyan and Orange both glared at him.

Red somehow managed to wedge himself into a corner of the bathroom ceiling where all of the pipes were clustered together. He felt a little bit like an angry monkey being watched by tourists at the zoo right now.

“Red, if you break the goddamn pipes, you’re on janitorial duty until we reach Polus!” Black threatened him.

“I’m okay with those chances,” Red replied.

“A’ight, I got a ladder,” Lime said when he entered the room carrying the aforementioned ladder.

Red backed into the corner and tried to wedge himself further inside of the pipes as Orange grabbed him. “Come on! You’ll be fine! I get this done once a month. It only takes a minute and it doesn’t even hurt.”

Orange managed to get an arm around his waist and dragged him out. Red thrashed, trying to get back on the pipes, and nearly made Orange fall from the ladder. He saw Blue flinch, clearly wanting to run forward and catch him should Red successfully manage to knock him off. He was distracted for just a second, a second that Orange managed to use to get him down from the pipes and onto the floor.

“NO!” Red shouted.

“Alright. Bring him to the medbay,” Cyan ordered.

Red was not done fighting. Twice he got out of Orange’s grip. The first time he grabbed onto Purple’s legs and refused to let go, even after he tripped him and was tangled up in his limbs on the ground. He felt a little apologetic for hurting him but didn’t have time to apologize as he was pried and dragged off. The second time he got away and scrambled on his belly down the hall until Orange grabbed his legs and dragged him back.

They made it as far as the cafeteria door. Red released his grip on the bench that he was dragging with him and latched onto the door frame, and that was where he got stuck again. If one looked close enough they might be able to tell that the shapes of his hands inside his gloves looked a little strange, and that’s because he’d just ejected his claws through his artificial fingers and was using them to hold on for dear life.

“It’s just a checkup! It won’t even hurt!” Orange reasoned as he tried to pull him off. “Blue, grab his arms!”

“I’m trying!” Blue said. Red let go of the door with one hand, but only long enough to slap him repeatedly on the side of the head and quickly grabbed the frame again. He felt bad for hitting him, even if it was just a light tap. “He just slapped me!”

“Red, you literally would have been done by now if you had just cooperated!” Cyan pointed out. Red growled at her and once more realized that he shouldn’t have made that sound. Humans didn’t growl, not like that. Fuck...shit...he just wanted to get caught, didn’t he? “Did you just growl at me?”

Red let go of the door and immediately attacked Orange, not hurting him but slapping at either side of his helmet and catching him by enough surprise that he dropped him. Before anyone else could grab him he sprinted in the opposite direction, through the opposing door and into the hallway. He dove into a vent and wedged himself far enough back that they wouldn’t be able to see him and grew still, not daring to make any sound as Orange and Cyan ran by looking for him.

Eventually Cyan grew pissed off and threw her hands up in the air. “You know what, I don’t even care. If you’ve got some serious medical anomaly that needs attention now, that’s on you!” she shouted. “I’ve got shit to do, too!”

“Holy shit, he dented the track and now the door won’t close all the way!” Lime shouted from the cafeteria.

Red did not move from that vent for the rest of the day, not wanting to risk being found by someone and dragged back and no one seemed even the least bit perplexed that they couldn’t find him again. That was a close one...he wasn’t sure if he could keep this up for two whole years.

_The present day…_

Cyan was immediately overwhelmed by everyone pouring into the medbay and shouting at her at once. Brown did not have any formal medical training other than the few things he had picked up from watching Cyan or from assisting her whenever he could. The last time she’d required his assistance with a patient was when Orange had two of his fingers amputated in an accident with a loose engine belt. Now he was running around trying to gather up the supplies that she had requested of him, leaving her to assess the conditions of multiple patients.

Purple had tucked Pink into the furthest bed and elevated his injured leg with a pillow. “Don’t worry about me,” Pink said, even though his leg was in agonizing pain right now. “Just focus on Red and Blue. I’ll be fine for now.”

Cyan’s heart sank when she saw Orange carrying her older brother into the medbay. His tangerine colored suit was drenched in blood, none of which was his. Blue was passed out in his arms and remained unconscious when he got him into the nearest bed. He managed to stay remarkably calm despite the fact that he was covered in his boyfriend’s blood, though the look on his face as he passed Cyan showed that he silently acknowledged exactly how serious this was.

Cyan looked at Blue’s arm. It was horrendously mangled and her first thought was that she might have to amputate it. _No...I can’t do that,_ she told herself. She pushed that thought to the side. She couldn’t bring herself to think that she might have to amputate her own brother’s arm. When she took this job it was so that she could stay with her brother while he was in space for two years. She never even considered the fact that he might get seriously hurt and she’d be the only one capable of saving his life.

White was huffing and puffing in the rear. “Don’t worry, guys. Just let the fat guy carry the heavy one,” White huffed as he dragged Red in. “Where do I put him?” Cyan stood in the middle of the medbay, her mind completely clouded over as she tried to process what was going on. “Cyan? Where do I put him?”

She couldn’t immediately tell what was wrong with Red. He was covered in...tar? Was he infected with some kind of alien bacteria or something? She had never seen anything like it. “Put him on the scanner,” she finally said, waving with one hand vaguely towards the bioscanner.

White looked concerned but did as requested. He almost dropped Red on his head and his body flopped limply as he rolled onto his side. Red had managed to retract all of his tentacles before passing out completely in White’s arms.

Cyan hit the power button and just took a moment to breathe as the bioscanner did its job. She felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Cyan, stay calm,” Brown tried to reassure her. “It’ll be okay.”

White looked far more wary as he watched the scanner work, like he was dreading the results. When the scan was done, he actually had his hand against the front of his visor and refused to look at the screen.

Cyan turned her head and gasped when his vitals came up. Holy hell, Red was a lot heavier than he looked. How could someone his size weigh more than Orange? She looked at the list of pathologies, expecting to see a map of internal injuries and maybe a detection of a foreign bacteria or fungus or something and instead felt her jaw drop.

Cyan now knew why Red refused to ever get a medical scan, why he always put up a fight and made excuses for why he didn’t need one, why he was always disappearing whenever “submit scan” popped up on his task list once a month every month. _Red was an impostor._ The images generated by his body scan came up and his insides looked _fucking horrifying._

There were teeth in places where teeth never should be found, hundreds of them all clustered together in pockets like a mouth suffering hyperdontia, including several massive ones interlocked just behind his chest wall, disguised as a ribcage. His organs were squished and shifted around wherever they fit in between clusters of thick tentacles with no logic or reason until his insides looked worse than a woman in a tight corset. He had no bones, though there seemed to be hidden chitinous structures that seemed almost like extra legs? Armored tentacles? More claws? Maybe?

The list of pathologies alerted her to what in a human would have been considered medical anomalies but to an alien was probably just normal biology. His body was incredibly compacted and dense, which at least solved the mystery of why he was so goddamn heavy. Red possessed a set of both ovaries and testes, which caused the machine to retroactively “correct” his biological sex from “male” to “intersex” in his medical file. It also indicated several masses that it identified as tumors and that he was missing several vital organs, namely lungs, a brain, and an intestinal tract. She suspected that the “tumors” were actually organs that the scanner just didn’t have the knowledge to identify and were probably equivalents for many of the organs that were supposedly missing.

Software limitations did not allow the scanner to question how a “human” could even be alive without a brain or functioning lungs. She couldn’t explain the lack of an intestinal tract though, but come to think of it, she’d never once seen Red actually having to get up to use the bathroom...did impostors just not do that, or did they have another way of expelling waste products from their body?

The sound of a steel tray crashing to the floor behind her reminded her there were other pressing matters to tend to right now. Brown was standing a few feet back from her and had dropped a tray full of painkillers to the floor as he jerked away from the creature on the scanner. He looked at the results blown up on the screen and then looked back at Red. His expression was unreadable inside his helmet, but it was obvious what he was thinking.

“Red...Red is an impostor?” he stuttered out.

Everyone was quiet. White finally spoke up. “Yes. He’s an impostor. I probably should have told you before we put him on the scanner.”

“Brown...” Cyan said, hoping to calm him down before it was too late and he had a mental breakdown when she needed his help the most.

Black knocked on the edge of the door to get Cyan’s attention. “We need to decide what we’re going to do with Red,” he said. No _“Hello”_ , no _“How are Red, Pink, and Blue doing?”_ She looked around and realized that she and Brown had to be the last two people on the Skeld to find out that Red wasn’t human.

Cyan looked at Red as he slowly started to move his head and mumbled, “What’s going on? Where’s Blue?”

“No!” she heard Pink shouting at Black from his bed. “You stay away from him!” Pink knew that Red was an impostor and he was _defending_ him?

Orange started helping Red off the scanner and into a much more comfortable bed. “Can this wait, boss? We’ve got people badly hurt right now!”

“Cyan, get that thing out of the medbay. I don’t want it here,” Brown started to whimper as he began to freak out. “Make them get it out of here!”

“Red is not a thing!” Purple snapped at him. “He saved Pink and Blue’s lives!” Purple was defending him too now.

“Can someone explain to me just what the hell happened on that ship?” Cyan demanded.

“Long story short,” White said, “Red is an impostor. But I think you know that already.” He was standing at the sink trying to wash off the black tar staining his colorless suit. Cyan now realized that this was not a foreign pathogen, but most likely what impostor blood just happened to look like.

She pointed at her mutilated brother. “But he’s not the impostor that did this?”

“No. Trust me when I say that Red would never hurt Blue.”

“How do you fucking know that?” Brown shouted. “You always think, ‘this person could never hurt me,’ and then it fucking turns out that it was a lie!”

“Can we maybe sedate him or something?” Orange suggested.

Cyan looked exasperated and had half a mind to say yes, but she didn’t like drugging him when he was freaking out unless he started to become a danger to himself or others. “No I’m not going to just sedate him!”

She started to get seriously overwhelmed when everyone started shouting over each other, some of them in defense of Red while others argued that he was dangerous and should be treated like the dangerous alien that he really was, and then Brown started having a panic attack over the impostor struggling to sit up in the bed, her unconscious brother was still slowly bleeding to death, and eventually it all came to a head when she just sort of snapped.

“Everyone get the fuck out!” she suddenly shouted. It grew quiet as everyone processed what Cyan had just demanded of them. “Unless you are in immediate need of medical attention, get the fuck out of my medbay!”

“Cyan?” Brown called her name.

“You too! Get out!” She pointed at White. “Not you, you stay. I need your help.” White nodded.

Brown clearly looked hurt that she was asking White for help over him, but she just could not trust him to remain in the medbay right now while he was demanding that she get Red out of there every six seconds. Black seemed a little surprised that she was standing up to him as her captain, but he supposed that while he may have run the ship itself, the medbay was technically Cyan’s domain.

“Orange, you too,” Cyan ordered. It hurt to make him leave, but she could tell despite the brave face he was putting on he was emotionally compromised right now. She knew because she felt the same exact way.

“I...uh...okay,” he finally agreed. “But I’m staying outside the door. I’m not going anywhere until you tell me that Blue is okay.”

Once everyone else had shuffled out she shook her head and said to White, “I need to keep Lucas stable. I can’t put it off anymore.”

“He’ll be okay,” Pink reassured her. He was a little calmer now that Brown had given him a painkiller to dull the throbbing in his fractured leg. “Right Red?”

The impostor didn’t answer him. He was already passed out again.

* * *

Orange sat outside the medbay for several hours. During that time Green brought him a tray of food. He appreciated the thought but he wasn’t really hungry. A few times Brown would walk by and huff. He clearly looked concerned and wanted to run into the room, ostensibly to protect Cyan, but it would be a pointless effort since Orange knew that Red was harmless. He just wished he could convince Brown of this.

Lime kept his distance from the medbay and it was clear that he was just as distrustful of Red as Green and Brown were, but while Brown was reacting with abject terror, Lime seemed less afraid and more angry, like Red being an impostor was somehow a personal offense against him.

Black seemed a little more on the fence and Orange couldn’t tell what he was thinking about the Red situation. On one hand he seemed like he distrusted him now that he knew he wasn’t human. On the other he seemed conflicted with the memory that Red was their friend and he had several opportunities to kill off his crewmates over the course of eleven months and had taken none of them.

White finally emerged from the medbay and he looked like absolute shit. His biggest mistake was picking a suit completely devoid of color when he got first pick of all the available colors. He was now simultaneously covered in black blotches and stained bloody red. Orange was still covered in blood himself but it didn’t look as obvious against the tangerine color as it did against pure white.

Orange quickly got to his feet and looked eager for an update on his boyfriend’s progress that was long overdue. “Well?”

White sighed. “Well he’s stable,” he said with relief. “And Cyan thinks she might have been able to save his arm, but he’ll likely have limited use of it, probably for the rest of his life.”

“But he’ll still have it?”

“Yes. He’ll still have it, just with permanent nerve damage.”

“Well fuck,” Orange said. “I guess I’ll have something to one-up him whenever he brings up the fact that I’m missing fingers now.” White knew it was a poor attempt at humor as a coping mechanism, but he still chuckled a little anyway. “How is everyone else?”

“Red woke up and is refusing medical attention. Apparently he can regenerate his injuries on his own, he just needs a safe place until his body repairs itself,” White explained. “And Pink fractured his tibia, but Cyan says it’s not that bad and he can walk on it as long as he keeps a boot on.”

“Pink and Red got off easy compared to Blue, huh?”

“No shit,” White sighed. “How are the rest of the crew?”

“I really think we should have sedated Brown. He’s acting like we just summoned the devil with a ouija board.”

“Honestly can you blame him? He...” White had a deer in the headlights look. “Oh. I’m not supposed to tell you that.”

Orange looked down the hall to make sure no one was around to hear him and whispered, “If it’s about how he lost his legs, I already know. Red told me.”

“If Red knows, then hopefully he understands.” He leaned against the wall. “I need a cigarette.”

“Sucks for you that we’re not supposed to smoke up here.”

“Lime and I smoke in the bathroom all the time. The trick is to stand next to the exhaust vent so all the smoke blows out and have the other stand guard in case Black shows up.” When he saw Orange’s head cock he added, “Hey, being an admin doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally do things that I know I’m not supposed to.”

“When can I go see him?” Orange asked.

“Well he’s still in a medically induced coma and Cyan still doesn’t want anyone in the medbay right now, but she told me she’ll call you when she’s ready to let you in.” He nodded towards the cafeteria. “Until then, Pink, Red, and Cyan haven’t eaten in a while, so we should probably get them some food.”

Pink was usually the ship’s cook, and even though a lot of the other crewmates knew how to cook and were happy to make occasional meals for themselves, he always insisted on at least helping, almost as though he thought he would be replaced once they realized they could make food without him. Orange hadn’t made more than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for himself in almost a year because every time he was caught in the kitchen, Pink would jump the counter and ask him what he wanted to eat. It felt weird being on the reverse side and making food for Pink for a change.

They settled on spaghetti. It was quick and easy and the meatballs would settle Red’s carnivore cravings. White noticed that Orange made up a plate for Blue too, even though he knew most likely he would never eat it. He didn’t say anything as he placed it on a tray and helped carry it to the medbay.

White went in first and nodded for Orange to follow once Cyan gave the okay. She wouldn’t let them in the part of the medbay where Blue was resting, but Orange could see Pink and Red just fine. Pink was sitting up in a chair, a fracture boot on his leg, and Red was on top of a table and licking his wounds until the thick, coagulated blood was wiped clean.

“You know they’re going to want to vote whether or not to kick you,” Orange said somberly.

Red paused, one leg in the air as he licked a gash down his thigh. He retracted his tongue and lowered it. “I’m surprised they haven’t already.”

“They can’t until I get there. All admins need to be present for a vote to take place,” White pointed out.

Pink pushed his meatballs around on his plate. “I can’t believe they still want to space you. I would literally be dead in a vent if it weren’t for you.”

Red looked touched, as he should be. “It makes me happy to know that you’re on my side, but unfortunately I knew this was going to happen. Why do you think I didn’t tell anyone I was an impostor right off the bat?”

“Honestly I don’t know if we even would have believed you, not unless you busted out with your tentacles in the middle of the cafeteria,” Pink pointed out.

They heard something come through the speakers inside of White’s helmet. He stared at the ground in front of him a while before answering, “Yes, sir.”

“What is it?” Cyan asked. She sounded exhausted and had barely touched any of her spaghetti.

“Black wants us all to meet in the cafeteria when we’re done eating,” White replied. “He says we have to figure out what we’re going to do with Red sooner or later.”

“Motherfucker,” Orange mumbled under his breath. “We don’t have to do anything with Red! He’s not a threat to us!”

“I think it’s more for Brown and Lime’s sake. It sounds like he already knows what the result is going to be.”

 _What is the result going to be?_ Red thought as he ate all of Cyan’s untouched meatballs off her plate.

* * *

Red sat in a chair against the wall, his legs crossed and his head down. He looked just as casual as he was when he was trying to avoid attention while sitting by himself at lunch, only this time it wasn’t working and all eyes were on him.

“I still don’t think it’s fair to vote while Blue is unconscious in the medbay,” Orange said. He sounded angry. Maybe he was right to be.

“Unfortunately we can’t put this off until he wakes up. This has to be done now,” Black replied. He sounded like he regretted the fact that they had to wait for Blue.

“Fuck,” Orange said. “Goddammit.”

All voting was done anonymously, but admins had access to who had voted which way, which meant that Black, White and Green would be able to see how everyone voted. Normally the system had been used for stupid shit like deciding who should do the dishes that night or what movie they should watch on movie night. Never have they had to make a decision that would have such a strong impact on someone’s very survival.

As everyone got their tablets out, they automatically synched up to the voting screen where Black had posed the question, “Should we space Red?” Orange did the math, and even though he knew there were those among them who would vote “Yes,” he didn’t think there were enough people on their side to get Red ejected. Still, the fact that there was anyone would would even vote “Yes” bothered him. The poll may have been anonymous, but he knew who they were, and he was currently glaring daggers at Brown, Lime, and Green.

White watched the results come in. Three voted to send Blue to his death. He felt disappointed that Lime’s name came up on the list, though the result was not unexpected to him. There were five votes to let him live. White was most surprised at one of the names under “skip vote”.

Red had refused to vote, even to save his own hide, and had hit skip the instant the question was posed. This wasn’t unexpected knowing everything that White knew about Red, but what was expecting was that Black had voted to skip. White had been so sure that he would vote to space Red that seeing his name right under Red’s was a shock.

The results of the vote were clear, and Red would live to see another day. This wasn’t as much of a blessing as it seemed as White knew that the impostor had a rough road ahead of him now that he knew that three of his crewmates were completely hostile towards him.

“Who else skipped?” Lime demanded to know. “I know Red probably did, but there’s another skip vote here!”

“Never mind that,” White replied. “Let’s focus on the fact that most of the crew doesn’t want to eject Red.”

Brown was silent up until now. He angrily turned around and stormed off. “You’re all making a fucking mistake,” he said over his shoulder before disappearing.

Cyan had her head down. She looked emotionally exhausted, like she wanted to cry.

Black looked at his exhausted crew and then at Red. The impostor still hadn’t looked up from the floor. “Alright, everyone. We’ve had a rough day. Let’s try to get some sleep and we’ll talk more about this in the morning.”

“Fuck this,” Lime muttered before following Brown out.

“Ignore them,” Purple said, “they’re just scared.”

“Klay, can we talk?” Green asked. She sounded angry, likely over his skipped vote, not that it would have helped her eject Red no matter who he voted for.

As everyone settled in for the night, Black making himself comfortable in Blue’s unoccupied bed (because Green didn’t want him anywhere near her right now), the room grew quiet when Red came in last. Everyone stared at him in awkward silence.

Brown’s bed was the closest to the door and he immediately jumped back as though Red were made of venomous snakes and was trying to bite him. Orange got up and quickly dragged him into the hall.

“Hey, look, I know this really sucks, and to be perfectly clear, I want you to stay here with us. Unfortunately Lime and Brown don’t feel safe with you around while they’re sleeping, and...uh...”

“I understand,” Red said, though the unmistakable bitterness in his voice suggested that what he really wanted to say was, “Fuck you.”

He pushed past Orange and made his way to his bed, grabbing his favorite blanket and immediately climbing into the vent with it. He would later come to realize his mistake in reminding everyone that there was an air vent there when he tried to come back through that way and found out that it had been soldered shut so he couldn’t open the cover, no matter how hard he pushed.

He emerged from the vent and made his way to the medbay where Cyan was asleep in a chair at her desk. He covered her with his blanket, being gentle so as not to wake her, and made his way back through the medbay.

He pulled the curtain back that hid Blue from view. His partner was still unconscious as various drugs kept him from waking up. Red wondered if he was dreaming right now. Was he having nightmares or only good dreams? Would he remember any of them when he woke up or would they be forever lost to time? He was hooked up to so many tubes and wires and his arm had bandages tightly wrapped around it to keep the flesh together while it worked to heal. The machines around him beeped and whirred as they monitored his vitals, administered fluids and medications, and generally kept him alive.

Red crawled under the bed and folded his tentacles under his head as he curled up beneath him. Maybe Blue was having a good dream right now, but that night, Red only had nightmares.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The mental image of Orange poking at Red with a broom to try and get him down like he’s a misbehaving cat will probably make me giggle for the rest of the night now.
> 
> Speaking of Red, have his profile from my notes.
> 
> Red, Real Name: “Paxton” (alias), Details: Impostor, 17-ish yo in Polus years (roughly about mid to late 20s in human developmental time), Technically pansexual but has a preference for human men  
> Occupation: Security Guard  
> Random Facts: Loves hot dogs and chocolate milk. Hates small children of any species but thinks older ones can be okay. Secretly has a latex bondage and BDSM kink. Is scared of any scenario that forces him to relinquish control and doesn’t like feeling helpless or vulnerable. Technically a hermaphrodite but consciously identifies as male.  
> Additional Notes: When I asked my sister for a random color when trying to decide the color of the impostor, she answered “Blurple”, so instead I just went with red as a nice contrast to blue. Originally his color wasn’t even supposed to have been explicitly revealed to Blue with him instead suspecting Orange as the impostor while it’s hinted that it was actually Red.


	4. Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Red gets to live, for now, but three of his crewmates still voted to kill him. Also a possible relationship is formed and a new friend is made, but can they be trusted?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After the last two chapters, hopefully now some of the humor can actually start! And...also I’m not really thrilled with Pink and Purple’s chemistry in this chapter. Promise me when I say they had better chemistry in an early edition of this chapter, but sadly the file somehow got corrupted and I lost most of it, which is why this is being posted now and not days ago. I guess me dying inside made it harder to recreate the chapter.

Purple could hear footsteps down the hall as crewmates made their way to their respective tasks. Lime was heading to O2 to clean out the filters and White stopped into navigation a few times to check on the progress of a diagnostic he was running. Purple’s own task list sat open on his tablet, but he didn’t even start on it yet. He had all day. Right now he had a new self imposed task that was more important.

He’d been working for an hour, running a program through the ship’s computer and trying to hack and hijack the SOS being broadcast by the Knight while they were still within range. Finally he managed to crack it and he was relieved that he did so. Red had warned the crewmates they needed to get off the ship because he didn’t think the hostile impostor was truly dead, just knocked out, which meant he was still roaming the ship, waiting for more victims to respond to the signal requesting help, knowing they had to answer if they were MIRA.

Once Purple got into the encryption he injected his own warning into the message: _Response already made._ _I_ _mpostor trap._ _No valuable cargo or crewmate survivors_ _. Stay away and do not respond._

The impostor would likely not be technologically capable enough to catch that the message had been added or to alter it if he somehow did notice, leaving him forever trapped on a derelict ship with the rotting corpses of his victims and no way to get off now that there was no power to run the emergency escape pods. Purple could rest easy knowing that no one else would end up like Blue, or worse, one of the Knight’s crewmates.

His stomach growled. He had skipped breakfast to do this. He was sure that given the circumstances, Black wouldn’t object to him putting his tasks off just a little bit longer to take a late breakfast. He got up and was about to head out when he noticed Lucky sitting by the vent, staring at it.

“Red, you in there?” he asked. Something seemed to have moved and spooked Lucky because she got up and ran out the door and down the hall towards shields. “Okay...well I’m getting breakfast if you’re hungry.” He thought he heard something shuffle around inside but it went silent again. “Don’t tell me those rats got on board the ship,” he mumbled. He’d have to ask Red to flush them out later.

* * *

Pink needed another hit of the pain meds that Cyan had prescribed him when he woke up. He could feel nothing but throbbing pain shooting through his leg, up his hip, and into his side. As he became lucid and washed it down with some water from a bottle that had been left on his bed for him, he looked around the crew quarters and realized that he was the only one here. Why had no one woken him? He was supposed to make everyone breakfast this morning!

He skipped out on his morning shower figuring he’d just take it a little bit later in the day and made his way to the cafeteria. No one was around, as pretty much everyone had already gotten started on the day’s tasks. Purple was the only one still there. He was in the kitchen stirring something in a frying pan on the stove and there were dishes piled in the sink suggesting everyone had fared well without him. Oh sure, they were content to make their own food, but they couldn’t do their own fucking dishes afterwards?

“Good morning, Pink!” Purple said. “Sorry we didn’t wake you, but you had a rough day yesterday, so we thought it was better to just let you sleep in.”

“Oh,” Pink just replied. “I guess that’s okay.” There had only been one time in the last eleven months where Pink hadn’t made everyone’s breakfast and that was when White had given everyone a twenty-four hour bug and he was too busy throwing up to do it. Not cooking anyone’s food felt almost surreal to him.

Purple looked back at the frying pan and poked it once more with his spatula. “I don’t know what I’m making, but I sure hope it’s edible!” he said jovially.

Pink’s eyes squinted when he heard that. Whatever Purple was making at least smelled good, like sauteing onions, but after what he just said Pink had to get a closer look at whatever was in the frying pan. His expression turned to horror when he saw what looked like baby vomit soup.

“What the fuck are you cooking?”

“Well I was trying to make an omelet, but I don’t think it’s turning out all that well.”

“Are those whole baby carrots?”

“Yeah, I kind of just looked in the fridge and threw whatever vegetables I could find in there, which was onions and carrots.”

“Did you at least saute or boil the carrots first?”

“Nope. I just grabbed them from the bag and threw them in there.”

“Why is it red?”

“Cinnamon.”

“Why did you put cinnamon in an omelet?”

“Accident. I was trying to add pepper, but I grabbed the wrong thing from the spice rack and by the time I realized I had already fully committed.”

“You have the heat on way too low!”

“Oh, thanks. I was wondering why it was taking so long for it to cook.”

Pink watched Purple turn the stove from L all the way to H. “Purple, your mom never allowed you in the kitchen, did she?”

“I tried to help my dad make some japchae once and he told me to stop helping him about when the noodles caught fire.”

Pink may not have been able to make everyone on the crew breakfast, but thank god he arrived just in time to save Purple from giving himself food poisoning. “Okay, throw that out. I’ll make you an actual omelet.”

Pink gathered ingredients and made Purple an actual omelet that didn’t look like whatever the hell Purple was trying to cook. He once more added onions but replaced the baby carrots with mushrooms, cheese, and red bell peppers. He ended up making a little too much. It really had been a while since he’d made proportions for only one person, but at least there was enough that he could have some too.

They both sat together at one of the tables. Purple had his laptop open beside him and Pink could see that instead of doing his tasks for the day, he had been playing a game, which was now paused. Lucky was sitting on the table in front of Purple and occasionally enjoying the little bit of egg that he gave her.

“Do you by any chance know where Red is?” Purple asked.

Pink shook his head. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering. I thought he was in the vent in navigation, but maybe I’m just imagining things.”

“He could be in the vent. It’s to my understanding that he has a habit of doing that when he doesn’t want to be found,” Pink shrugged. “I always did wonder where it was he went whenever we were looking for him.”

They ate in silence for a few minutes. Purple had almost finished his omelet before he asked, “Does it bother you that Red’s an impostor?”

“Why would it?” Pink asked. “Red saved my life, so clearly he isn’t going to hurt me. Him being a different species doesn’t make him not my friend anymore.”

“Well, that is true. I never knew impostors could be friendly. I always thought they all were monsters.” Purple started petting the cat and Lucky started purring.

“Well I suppose people come on a spectrum too. Serial killers exist.”

“That is also true.” There was another brief silence so they could finish chewing. “How’s your leg?”

Pink had it stretched out under the table. The boot was only mildly uncomfortable, but he didn’t mind so much for the trade off that he’d get to walk still. “Hurts,” he admitted, “but at least Cyan gave me some painkillers.”

“You’re okay though, right?”

Pink didn’t question what he meant by that. Purple was clearly worried that Pink might end up suffering some kind of trauma from what he went through, similar to what Brown was suffering from. Pink didn’t really think what he went through was that bad. Sure, it was definitely terrifying at the time, but in hindsight it could have gotten much worse. A fracture in the leg was the absolute best outcome considering the numerous turns that situation could have taken.

“I’m actually fine,” he shrugged. “But are you okay?”

Purple tapped his plate with his fork and looked unsettled. “I’m not going to lie, Pink. I thought I was about to watch you die.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t,” Pink said calmly. “So focus on the fact that I’m still alive and not on the fact that I could have died.”

Purple smiled, but he still had this very unsettled aura about him. “I...I really like you, Pink. I don’t know what I would have done if something were to happen to you.”

Pink realized that he rarely ever saw Purple take his helmet off. He pretty much even ate with it on, just sort of pushing the visor back far enough to eat. He never got to see his face often and, well, he was just now noticing that Purple was kind of cute. To be fair he had always kind of thought that, just about things other than his appearance: His social awkwardness, his laid back behavior...the fact that he was a lot taller than Pink was...

“Well if I die, you can start by playing my favorite song in my memory at my wake,” Pink suggested.

“What’s your favorite song?”

“Highway to Hell.”

Purple took a moment to process that before he started laughing. “Somehow I don’t think anyone else would find that as funny as you would have.”

“They would have known that it was what I wanted.” He finished his omelet and reached for his glass of milk while Lucky licked his plate before cringing away from the leftover hot sauce he’d poured all over his omelet. “And if you guys still have my body, you can play it right as you airdrop me into a volcano.”

“Where the hell are we going to find a volcano in space?”

“Everywhere. There’s probably always a planet or moon somewhere within flight distance of the Skeld that’s volcanically active.”

“What if we just fling you into a gas giant?”

Pink shrugged. “Even better.”

Purple still had tasks to do, his game was still on pause, and they had both finished eating their breakfast a while ago, but he was in no rush to get back to work as they both just sat there in the cafeteria and carried on a conversation. Black would probably yell at Purple to get back to his tasks if he saw him slacking off while White wouldn’t have cared when he did his tasks as long as they got done that day if he were the one to catch him, so he just kept an eye out just in case. He didn’t want to go back to work just yet. He just wanted to stay here and talk to Pink some more.

Pink caught Purple by surprise when he asked him, “You wanna fuck?”

“I...uh...yes?” Purple replied.

He somehow sounded confused yet sure of his answer at the same time, even though the out of nowhere question had completely taken him aback. Yes he wanted to fuck. He wanted to fuck Pink for a long time, he was just too shy to say something. He was really cute and he liked how Pink always saved the cinnamon roll with the most icing for him at breakfast. He liked when Pink called him “big guy” and how he was always the most cheerfully optimistic member of the crew, even when everything seemed to be going wrong. Even now he was sure Pink could tell he was blushing and he didn’t have the benefit of wearing his helmet to shield his face.

“Awesome.” Pink got up and started gathering up his dishes. “We just need to make one quick pit stop to get something first.”

“Shouldn’t we be doing our tasks first?”

“Uh...” Pink looked at his task list, which was completely clear. White had given him a day off after what had happened yesterday, also explaining why no one had waken him up. He looked at the sink full of dishes and guessed that was his task today. “Well I have nothing to do, so I can help you with your tasks so you can finish faster.”

“I’m okay with this,” Purple replied.

“Great. It’s settled. Come with me!”

The cafeteria was now quiet, leaving behind only the cat. She watched them leave, licking a paw calmly, and waited a few minutes to make sure that neither of them came back before jumping down off the table. The bench creaked under her extremely condensed weight as she then jumped to the floor and made her way to the kitchen.

The leftover omelet that had been temporarily forgotten in the pan beside the stove smelled tantalizingly appetizing. Once more waiting to make sure no one would show up, tentacles emerged from the cat’s face and grabbed the pan, pulling it down to the floor and scooping out the omelet into her mouth. She swallowed it whole and turned around to walk towards the vent, running into Lucky along the way.

The ship cat hissed at her and ran back out the door, which was programmed to allow her free reign of the ship. She watched her go and shrugged, moved towards the vent, and slipped right in.

* * *

Brown was sorting through his medications when Purple and Pink both stormed into the crew quarters and flopped at the foot of his bunk. “Oh hey, guys. Is your leg okay, Pink? Do you need me to fetch Cyan for you or something?” he asked with concern.

“My leg is fine,” Pink replied. “We were wondering if we could borrow a condom.”

“If you could _borrow_ a condom?” Brown said with even more concern. “Did you plan on actually returning it when you were done with it?”

“Oh yeah, we totally thought we’d just use it and then tie it up and drop it in your duffel bag later,” Pink replied.

Brown suddenly looked like he was dying a little inside. “Okay, well that’s really gross, and also what makes you think that I even have condoms?”

“Come on, Brown, we know Cyan gave you some. The only person on the Skeld who doesn’t know about you railing Blue’s sister is Blue,” Purple pointed out.

Brown wordlessly reached into his duffel bag and tossed them a condom. “Please don’t ever say that out loud where people can hear you again,” he pleaded.

“Cool. Thanks, Brown!” Purple said.

Pink hopped onto his back before he could get up. “So where should we go?”

“I dunno...navigation! No one ever goes in there!” Purple suggested before carrying him off.

* * *

White looked at the messages he had coming in on his tablet. Black wanted him to let Lime know to check out one of the vents that had a foul smell wafting out of it. Cyan was updating him on Blue’s health and reassuring him he was stable and he’d probably wake up later that evening. A note from Pink told him to keep everyone the hell out of his kitchen because he was making everyone dinner later and he didn’t want anyone to say shit about that.

“Good news, Lime. Pink’s making dinner, so you don’t have to fend for yourself like this morning,” White said.

“What the hell do you mean by that?” Lime asked.

“Well you know...the fact that you have absolutely no idea how to cook.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because this morning when I told you Black and I agreed to give Pink the day off and have everyone make their own breakfast, you poured Don Dew directly into a box of Cheez Its and ate it like cereal.” He tapped through his personal task list, which was three times longer than the lists most of the crew had due to his extra duties as an admin piling up along with the extra tasks that he had to do in prep for reaching Polus. “By the way, the hallway vent smells bad and Black wants you to check it out. Have fun!” He knew exactly why the hallway vent smelled bad and decided to leave it a surprise for Lime to find.

Alright, it seemed everyone was updating their lists, showing him that they were all doing their tasks. He looked at Purple’s task list, which was still stagnant with no boxes checked off. _Goddammit, Purple. Why do you have to be such a slacker?_

He was probably playing video games in navigation again. He got up from the seat in admin and walked all the way to navigation to confront him. He may have been more laid back than Green and Black but he still had to firmly remind people from time to time that he was in fact in charge and they still had to listen to him when he assigned them tasks.

“Purple, why are your tasks not...” White’s demand was choked in his throat when he figured out the answer pretty quickly.

Pink must have been feeling better because he’d just walked in on him and Purple feverishly making out, Purple pinning him to the console underneath him and trying to get his suit off him while Pink grinded against his leg. They were not in a relationship...that he knew of...so it seemed apparent that they might have been engaging in what was known as “Thank god I’m still alive!” sex after Pink was very nearly slaughtered by an impostor. It would be interesting to see if anything further came out of it, but White was definitely not interested in continuing to watch.

Goddammit, his dark gift for horrendous timing was working again...

“I uh...guess I’ll leave you to it,” White said awkwardly as he started to back out of the room. “Purple, make sure your tasks get done eventually please.”

Pink broke the kiss and said, “Lock the door on your way out please!” while Purple buried his face in his neck.

White guessed that brought the total number of unattached people on this ship down to two, himself and Lime. Lime did not have a partner because he was way too obnoxious for any woman to stand him for a long enough period of time while he himself just never had any interest in other people either physically or romantically, though he guessed Orange’s frequent jokes about Lime being his boyfriend balanced them both out.

“Hey, White,” Green said as they passed each other in the hallway.

“Stay the fuck out of navigation for an hour,” he said, no doubt confusing her as he walked past at a brisk pace.

* * *

Red couldn’t remember taking his suit off last night, but it was now bunched up under his head. He must have done it while half asleep after waking up to numb tentacles. He wriggled his way out from under the medbay bed and stood up. The blanket he had covered Cyan with was folded neatly on one of the occupied beds. She’d been here and saw him under the bed with her brother, yet she didn’t wake him or say anything.

 _I guess she really does trust me,_ he thought. The thought was kind of heartwarming, a nice reassurance that someone still cared about him, even if there were members of the crew that didn’t want him anywhere near them.

Blue was still unconscious, so many tubes and hoses hooked up to him that he almost looked like a science experiment from a horror movie seconds before it broke out of the lab and went on a rampage through a small town with a dark secret. His arm was so bandaged up that it almost looked three times its size.

Cyan had really done a good job saving his arm, though admittedly she’d had a lot of machine assistance. If she didn’t, Blue’s arm would have been amputated since Cyan only had enough medical schooling to qualify as a medic and had not yet received enough education to be a doctor. She would not have known what she was doing if MIRA hadn’t provided her with the tools to help. He guessed that was one point for MIRA.

“Good morning, Red,” Cyan said.

She looked him up and down and seemed to be finding his lack of clothes questionable. It wasn’t like his dick was hanging out. Impostors kept that all tucked inside a pocket when they weren’t relaxed or aroused, unlike humans who seemed to like having their junk dangling in front of them so it could become an easy target for comical aim with heavy objects in movies.

“How is he doing?” Red asked.

“He’s stable. I think I’m going to let him wake up later. Also I was surprised to see you here,” she admitted. “I know you and my brother are friends, but I didn’t realize you cared about him that much.”

“What...oh.”

Red remembered that Blue never told Cyan that he was in a polyamorous relationship with both Red and Orange, so she only knew about Orange. The other crewmates were starting to suspect and some of them, like White, had already completely figured it out by now, but Cyan apparently just thought they were friends. He guessed selective obliviousness must have just run in their family considering Orange outright told Blue that Brown was sleeping with Cyan once before and Blue still had no idea his sister was in a relationship with their biologist.

“I guess I should check my task list,” Red replied. He looked at his list of tasks and cringed when he saw an order to stay away from the crewmates. That didn’t seem like something White would have written at all and had Green all over it. “Never mind. I guess I’m supposed to stay away from you.”

“Red,” Cyan said, “for what it’s worth, I trust you completely. And also...thanks.” A tear started rolling down from one of her eyes. “If it weren’t for you, I’d be mourning my brother right now.”

Red pulled her into a hug. She seemed wary of the teeth pressed against her chest, but he kept his maw closed through the hug. “I’d do it again for any of you,” he reassured her. He sighed as he finally pulled away. “Keep me and Orange updated if Blue’s status changes. I’m going to go make my rounds.” Even if no one trusted him he still wanted to continue doing his duty of keeping them safe.

“Uh, Red? Are you forgetting something?” Cyan asked. She had his suit held out in front of him. It was still stained in two different species worth of blood and had a strong smell of impostor sweat.

“Uh...I’m not putting that back on until I wash it,” he replied. “Just set it somewhere. I’ll come back for it.”

Pink and Purple waved at him in the hallway and Red noticed that they smelled like hormones and seemed impeccably cheerful this morning as they both got to work on Purple’s tasks. He could only guess what activities they had just participated in.

Orange was doing routine maintenance on one of the engines. Green gave him a dirty and suspicious look. Black looked uncomfortable when he saw him but didn’t try to get away from him. He supposed walking around as an impostor instead of a human didn’t make him look that much more endearing to his crewmates.

And then he found Lime, stuck inside the floor vent in the hallway down from navigation. He stood there next to him, thinking about how many porn films started this way as he watched Lime swearing and wriggling around as he tried to get out of the vent, his ass completely exposed and vulnerable. White also came by and the two of them both seemed to have the same thoughts if the amused smirk on White’s face was any indication.

“Lime...” Red said.

* * *

Investigating weird smells in the ventilation was not Lime’s idea of fun, especially when the smell came from so far down into the shaft that he couldn’t just reach in there and scrub the source off the walls. He couldn’t understand why he was the one being asked to do it when Red could easily fit his ass inside, though he supposed that Black didn’t want to ask Red to do much of anything now that he was aware he was an impostor. He asked White what Red’s tasks for the day were and White had admitted with shame that he’d allowed Green to write some of the tasks this morning and she had assigned Red to “stay the fuck away from the crew”.

Lime had merely replied to that reveal with, “Good. I hope he listens,” while White seemed offended that he even said that. White was just pissy lately that he’d been chewed out by Black in front of half the crew for not telling him that Red was an impostor and Green was threatening to report him to MIRA, which could result in a demotion from his admin rank.

He guessed that meant the task fell on him since he was the resident maintenance guy. He dropped his box of tools next to the offending vent and lifted the cover, which as expected was loose. Red had torn all the vent covers off so he could move around freely on the ship and no one had ever noticed since no one other than him had any reason to need to venture into the vents until now.

He could see what Black meant though, the smell was absolutely foul, like something had crawled inside of the vent and died. He thought of how there was one more guy who was supposed to be on their ship but he never showed up in time for takeoff. White told him that they had later received a message from MIRA that their no-show crewmate had been found...rotting deep inside of a vent at the starport where he’d been dragged inside and left to asphyxiate to death after he got into an argument with the wrong guy...and he briefly wondered if Red could have killed someone and done the same thing with the body.

He quickly dismissed the thought. No one was missing from the crew, including the cat, and they’d been up here for almost a year now. If Red had stashed a human corpse inside of the vent it would have been discovered long before now. It would be pretty stupid for him to start killing people now anyway. It wouldn’t be like no one knew who was doing it.

He poked his head inside of the vent and dropped his flashlight inside of it. “Goddammit,” he mumbled when he reached for it. The flashlight rolled further out of reach. “Shit!”

He started to climb in further after his flashlight thinking, hey, at least maybe he can see what was in the vent that smelled so strongly of death. It wasn’t until after he had wedged himself in pretty far that he realized why this was probably a really _really_ stupid idea.

“Oh fuck...I’m stuck,” Lime said as he tried to push his way back out of it.

One of his arms was pinned at his side, the other stuck inside the vent pressed up against his face. This was a really tight space and he suddenly became horrified for every crewmate who was ever dragged inside of a narrow vent and left to die. He thought of their poor missing crewmate and how terrified the guy must have been knowing that no one was going to come to help him.

As if on cue he heard Red’s amused voice coming from behind him. “Lime, you absolute dumbass.” He propped one foot up onto the back of Lime’s thigh and he could feel toes...four of them that were splayed out from each other almost like a chicken or a dinosaur. “Looks like you’re pretty damn stuck.”

Lime suddenly started panicking. “Oh fuck! I’ve seen enough hentai to know where this is going and I don’t like it!”

“Yeah, this is totally where that’s going,” Red replied sarcastically. “Because as an impostor, I totally fuck anyone and everything I can get my tentacles into and I don’t care that we’re literally in the middle of the hallway. Also it’s breeding season and I don’t have a suitable host to lay my eggs in, so I think you’ll do.”

“WHAT THE FUCK!” Lime shouted as he desperately tried to get out. He heard someone start laughing like an absolute mad man beside Red and realized the impostor wasn’t alone. “Wait...White? Is that you? Are you out there too?”

“He’s fucking with you, Lime,” White said.

“Or am I?” Red asked. “Hey White, how many eggs do you think his ass will hold before his gut explodes?”

“I don’t know...he’s a pretty small guy, but I swear I watched him eat an entire large pizza by himself before, so maybe he’s got a black hole where his insides should be.”

“Oh good, then maybe he can take all two hundred of them at once. He should be fine until they all hatch and start eating their way out of him, right?”

“WHAT THE _FUCK!”_ Lime shouted again as he tried to desperately wriggle his way out of the vent. “White, get me out of here!”

“Hang on buddy, I’ll get you out,” White said.

“I don’t know. Maybe we should just leave him in there. I mean he was stupid enough to climb in there in the first place.”

“Oh come on, you can’t just leave me here!” Lime whimpered. “It smells really bad and...hold up, did something just move down here?”

He tried to see in the dark vent but the flashlight he dropped was facing the wrong way and barely illuminated anything. Red made a whirring sound and started listening too. He kept watching until...there! Something moved away in the dark!

“Shit! Get me out of here! I think there’s a rat or something!”

“Calm down buddy, I got you,” Red said passively.

Lime did not like the feeling of Red’s tentacles wrapped around his body at all, especially as they gently pulled and twisted his body parts, pushing aside metal clasps and pockets that prevented him from being removed from the vent. Eventually the part of his suit that had him stuck slid out and he popped out easily in seconds.

“Here, take him,” Red said before passing Lime to White and diving into the vent.

“Do not ever let me climb into the vent again!” Lime shouted at his friend.

“I already told you not to climb into the vent again the last time you got stuck!” White pointed out.

“Well don’t let me do it a third time then!”

They could hear Red rustling down in the vent under the floors. It was obvious that he was both an impostor and inside the vent, so he made no attempts at moving stealthily as he investigated the sound.

“What the fuck!” they heard Red’s muffled voice through the floor. Seconds later he came back up from the vent. “Come on. We need to call an emergency meeting.”

“What’s wrong?” White asked.

“We need to move. Come on!”

Red sprinted through the cafeteria towards the emergency button in the center. It had been installed by MIRA ostensibly to call everyone together for emergency meetings, but they’d all been banned from even going near it after it had been abused several times due to the crew not knowing what constituted an actual emergency. Lime had pressed it once to complain that someone had eaten his chicken nuggets out of the fridge and Purple had pressed it once by accident when he set a box on top of it. They had to lock it under a glass box when Lucky called an emergency meeting several times just by walking across the table.

Confused crewmates gathered around, including the cat, who jumped up onto a nearby bench, her tail swishing around as she watched everyone gather. Probably hoping for a handout or a treat, Red suspected. Usually when everyone gathered together in the cafeteria it meant food.

“Who pressed the button?” Black demanded.

“I did!” Red fully admitted.

“Red? Why?”

Everyone was here except for Blue. Red didn’t like that his partner was vulnerable and alone in the medbay. “There’s an impostor on the ship!”

“No shit, Sherlock. We’re looking right at you,” Orange replied.

Red growled at him. “Not me, jackass. There’s another impostor among us.” Everyone started looking around at each other suspiciously. “It’s not one of you guys. It’s someone else.”

“Red, there’s no one else on the ship,” Pink pointed out. “We would have known by now.”

“You’re right, we would have noticed someone by now. They must have snuck onto the Skeld while we were on board the Knight.” He held up a rancid smelling pile of plastic wrap and styrofoam that had once contained the ground beef that he had “ripening” in the vents. “Someone ate the hamburger that I stashed in the ventilation. It was too far in for it to have been one of you.”

“Oh my god, you’re the reason the vents smelled like ass?” Lime said with disgust.

“You’re focusing on the wrong point, Lime. I know for a fact that I did not eat this and none of you could have reached it even if you did have the stomach to eat rotting meat. Somebody is in our ventilation other than me!”

Brown looked like he wanted to throw up. Cyan wrapped her arms around him and tried to keep him calm when he started shaking. He wasn’t the only one. The crewmates all suddenly looked wary and scared. Some of them may have trusted Red, but they didn’t know this other impostor, and if they came from the Knight, who was to say that they weren’t hostile?

“Black, what do we do?” Green asked.

“I don’t know,” her husband admitted. “Red? Any suggestions?”

“Well luckily for you guys, you have another impostor on the ship that’s on your side,” Red said. “The fact that we haven’t seen them yet means they’ve been hiding and probably don’t intend to show themselves. I can go into the vents after them and flush them out and we’ll figure out what to do with them from there.”

“Goddamn, this is all just one nightmare after another,” Black said.

“So what do we do while you’re in the vents?” Orange asked.

“Well first of all, someone needs to get to the medbay and guard Blue. There is a vent in there and he can’t fight back if it surprises him!”

Orange’s eyes went wide. “Fuck! You’re right!” He sprinted down the hall towards the medbay. Purple and Green followed after him, neither of them wanting him to be alone either.

“Okay, now we just gotta figure out...what’s that smell?”

“Spoiled meat?” Lime guessed.

“No...not that,” Red shook his head. “I smell an impostor.” _Oh no,_ he thought, _please tell me that one of my friends hasn’t been killed and replaced._

He started following the smell, stopping in front of Cyan when he noticed _another_ rather interesting smell. He sniffed the air and confirmed that it was in fact her that he smelled. He looked at her with shock. “Cyan?”

“Cyan?” Brown said in horror before jumping back away from her.

“No, not Cyan! She’s not an impostor!” Red quickly reassured him. “It’s just that...”

“It’s just that what?” Cyan asked.

“Uh. Nothing. We’ll talk about it later,” he shook his head. “I have to figure out where that impostor smell is coming from.”

“Guys, when did we get two cats?” Pink asked.

Everyone looked at Pink and then at Lucky, sitting on the bench. The cat looked...surprised? Could cats feel humanlike emotions?

“What do you mean?” White asked.

“There’s Lucky right there,” he said pointing at the cat sitting on the bench, “but she’s also over there.” He pointed towards the door where another cat was standing. The one at the door was staring down the cat on the bench and began hissing at her.

Red dove towards the cat on the bench, who jumped down to the floor, making a much louder thud than an animal of that size should have, and dove towards the vent cover. “Oh no you don’t!” he called after it, tentacles grabbing it and wrapping around its limbs.

The “cat’s” face exploded into tentacles and fought back against Red. He felt teeth sink into his side before the impostor wriggled out of his grasp and dove inside the vent. He chased in after it.

“The cat was a fucking impostor?” Brown shouted when he realized he’d been standing next to it the entire time. “Impostors can disguise themselves _as cats?”_

“Either that or we have a flerken infestation,” White replied.

“Okay, everyone stay calm. Red’s handling it,” Black instructed everyone. The entire wall shook when something hit the inside of the vent. “I think...”

“What do we do if he suddenly can’t handle it?” White asked. They seemed to be under the hallway floor this time and they could hear a floor panel get dislodged and knocked loose.

“He can handle it,” Pink said confidently.

“I am seriously not looking forward to having to fix the vents after this,” Lime sighed.

“Get out here!” Red’s distorted voice echoed from the vent.

A red-tinted betentacled blob started to ooze from the vent as Red came out backwards, dragging another boneless mass of meat, this one tinted a soft yellow. They could hear another distorted voice screaming, “No!” this one having a slightly more feminine tone. Both impostors spilled to the floor. Red had his tentacles wrapped around the second one, who seemed to be only slightly smaller than him, preventing them from leaving. The second impostor’s body made a wet slicking sound as it pulled free and backed itself into a corner, quickly taking on a more human appearance. Its human form looked like a young woman in a yellow suit.

“Please don’t hurt me!” it pleaded.

Pink immediately started pointing at the impostor. “That’s her!” he shouted. “That’s the woman that Purple and I were chasing!” He suddenly felt stupid. “Holy shit, I was chasing an impostor. How am I still alive?”

“What are you doing on our ship?” Red demanded. He hovered over her, his mass and tentacles spread out as much as he could to make himself seem larger and more domineering than he actually was.

The lemon-colored impostor was shivering in fear below him. “I just needed a ride! I figured you guys are almost to Polus. I’d just hide until you get there and slip out without you ever knowing I was here!”

“You didn’t think that I’d notice there was another impostor on the ship?” Red asked.

“Well honestly, I assumed they’d eject you,” they replied.

“Why were you pretending to be our cat?”

“I was hungry! I saw people giving the cat food, so I thought maybe I could get some food by pretending to be her!”

Red admitted that seemed like a somewhat solid though ultimately flawed plan. If the other impostor wanted to pull it off perfectly, they would have killed and eaten the cat so that Lucky couldn’t stumble in at the same time and give them away, and they also would have been given away if someone ever tried to pick them up and realized they were a lot heavier than a cat could possibly be. He didn’t want to complain too much about how they could have pulled off the con better though. He wasn’t particularly attached to the cat but he knew his crewmates were and Purple especially would be screaming for blood if the other impostor had killed Lucky.

Normally meeting a new impostor was a much friendlier affair. Red would offer the other impostor some of his tentacles and the other would do the same in kind so they could learn each other’s scent and hostilities wouldn’t occur unless their introduction revealed certain personality traits or habits that the other found abhorrent. Immediate hostilities were usually reserved for impostors that were intruding on another’s territory or picking fights with their friends or getting too handsy with an impostor that you had a desire to mate with. In this case, Red was motivated by a desire to protect his crewmates from an unknown intruder and refrained from making any friendly gestures or peace offerings just yet.

“I promise, I didn’t mean to harm your crew. I just wanted a ride,” the other impostor said.

Some of Red’s eyes visibly shifted to look at Black without turning his head completely around. He kept an eye on him in case he or the other crewmates were starting to show visible discomfort with the foreign impostor.

“Then why didn’t you ask?” he demanded to know.

“Would you have said yes if I did?”

“Uh...”

“Probably not,” White admitted.

“After what happened to Blue, I probably would have killed you,” Red agreed. He did not let his guard down completely but he did take a moment to try to learn more about the impostor beneath him, starting with what he could gather from her scent. “You smell young.”

“She ‘smells’ young?” Lime repeated. “Young has a smell?”

“Yes,” Red replied. “Your body produces different mixes of hormones depending on how old or young you are. I can’t pinpoint an exact age, but I can tell that this one here,” he gestured towards the impostor, “Can’t be much older than two.”

“Two?” Brown replied. “She looks a lot older than two!”

“Two Polus years are still a lot longer than human years, and also our babies age a lot faster than yours do,” Red pointed out. “I’m only about 17, but if you go by human time I’m older than Blue,” He looked at the impostor. “Am I correct?”

“I’m actually four, but you are more or less correct,” the impostor replied.

The impostor had a hint of a vague accent, the kind where you could tell English wasn’t a person’s first language but you had no idea what their first language was, hinting at an impostor that had just learned to speak a human language. Red still had slight inflections of the same accent, but his wasn’t nearly as pronounced and only became obvious when he was yelling, which admittedly wasn’t often.

“Can I ask her a few questions?” Black requested.

“Be my guest,” Red replied. He stepped aside, just enough to allow Black through but not enough to provide an opening for the frightened impostor beneath them to run, not that it would be a good idea for them to do so. Where would they go? Everyone already knew they were there, so it wasn’t like they’d get away for long.

Even without claws, a massive mouth where a ribcage should be, and tentacles, Black was still incredibly tall and domineering and they could both visibly see the impostor shrinking back against the corner of the cafeteria as he walked closer.

“Okay, first of all, what should we call you?”

“Well, my official designation was ‘Lemon’, everybody called me ‘Banana’, and I hated both those names,” the impostor replied.

“How about just ‘Yellow’ then?” Yellow had been the color designation of their missing crewmate and as such it was the only color choice left unclaimed aboard the Skeld.

“You’re naming it?” Brown protested before Cyan shushed him.

“You can call me Yellow.”

“Okay Yellow, is it just you on the Skeld or did the other one follow you?”

Yellow shook their head. “I left the ship while Gray was unconscious. I didn’t want him to follow me.” They looked at Red and addressed him directly. “You would know by now if he had followed me. He doesn’t exactly hide himself well.”

“I noticed,” Red nodded. He glanced at Black. “Don’t worry, I can tell when she’s lying. She’s not.”

“She?” Black said, addressing Red. He hadn’t been the only one to refer to her by female pronouns, but it was to his understanding that impostors didn’t have a concept of gender the way that humans did. Red calling her a she seemed to make it sound more official.

“She’s presenting as female, so unless she corrects me, she’s a she,” he replied.

“I’m a she,” Yellow agreed.

“Okay then, next question. What was your relationship to the other impostor? Gray, I think you called him?”

Yellow suddenly looked very uncomfortable, like she was recalling a very unpleasant memory of Gray that she didn’t want to speak of. “He was my mentor. He was mean.”

“Just mean?” Black asked.

“Well, I guess that’s the least possible word I could have used to describe him,” she replied. “He killed all my friends.”

“He killed the crewmates off pretty quickly. What exactly happened on that ship?” Red asked.

“Well, he started by killing them off slowly,” she replied. “I asked him not to hurt certain people. I really liked them. They were nice. I told him I didn’t care what happened to some of the other members of the crew, just as long as he spared my friends.”

“I’m assuming from the state of the Knight when we found it that he didn’t honor this,” Red guessed.

“No,” she shook her head. “He actually started targeting them specifically because I asked him not to.” Red could sympathize. It was considered a huge faux pas to attack humans that another impostor had claimed, either as friends or something else, unless it became necessary for self preservation. “So I reported him as an impostor. I knew I was taking a huge risk, I knew he would probably drag me down with him, but I didn’t want him to hurt anymore of my friends.”

“I’m assuming this didn’t go well?” Black asked.

“No. It went horrible. The second I accused him it turned out a lot of the other crewmates were suspecting it too and they had a lot of solid evidence, enough to convince everyone else. Once Gray realized that they had voted to eject him from the ship, he stopped trying to hide himself.”

“I saw how big he was,” Red replied. “I don’t think anyone could have stopped him once he set his mind on killing everyone.”

“It was a bloodbath,” Yellow agreed. “He didn’t hold back. He figured if he stopped he was a dead man anyway, so he killed the entire crew in less than two nights, and then he left me alive so that I could see what betraying him got me.” She sounded like she was about to cry. “A ship full of corpses that I had once called my friends.”

“The way you’re talking right now sounds kind of like Red,” White pointed out. “You don’t sound like you wanted to hurt anyone.”

“Oh believe me, I’m not above eating humans, but I have standards. I’m not going to kill people I consider friends and a lot of the people on the Knight were really nice, enough to balance out the ones that weren’t.”

“What about my friends?” Red asked. His tone sounded dangerous, like he was daring her to admit she’d kill the Skeld crew in a heartbeat.

“I have no reason to kill them. There’s plenty of food on the ship and none of them have pissed me off,” she replied.

“Give Lime some time,” White said.

“Hey!” Lime protested.

“Can we go back to something you said earlier?” Pink asked. “You said that Gray was your mentor? What exactly does that mean?”

“I can explain that,” Red replied. “Contrary to popular belief, we don’t crawl out of the womb knowing how to expertly shapeshift and infiltrate a crew. Normally someone older and more experienced will step in and show you how to do it.”

“Did you have a mentor?” Cyan asked.

Red looked like she’d just asked him how his experience in “The War” was. “Yes,” he finally admitted, “I don’t want to talk about him.”

“How did you get mixed up with an impostor like Gray? He sounds like he was nothing like you.”

“I didn’t really have much of a choice,” Yellow admitted. “He was the only other impostor on the ship I was born on that wasn’t my breeder and she asked him to mentor me. He was really good at pretending to be nice, so I don’t think she realized how much of a bad idea that was.”

“Why couldn’t your uh...breeder? I’m assuming that means your mother? Why couldn’t she have done it?”

Red once more explained for Pink. “Once you become of age you’re expected to leave the pack you were born into and find your own way. In an ideal setting you might find another pack and one of their members will mentor you, but to those of us born in space your breeder might have to find and appoint someone for you.”

“So your parents don’t show you any of that stuff?”

“Our ‘parents’ as you call them show us just enough that we don’t starve to death within minutes of leaving. That’s about it. Mimicry takes a really long time to master.”

“I’ve been learning for about three years now and I still can only do humans and cats,” Yellow admitted.

“That’s still a pretty good start. The human one is the most important,” Red replied.

“Can we please not praise it for being really good at tricking humans into thinking it’s one of us?” Brown asked.

“Skylar!” Cyan snapped.

“What?” he replied. “You know I’m right!”

Red and Black both looked apologetic. “Can you please excuse my crewmate? He had a really horrific experience with an impostor years ago.”

“I don’t blame him,” she replied.

Red looked at Black next. “Okay, so have you asked her all the questions you wanted to?”

“I have,” Black nodded. “Now I have one for you. What should we do with her?”

Red heard Brown mumble, “Airlock,” and then shriek with pain when Cyan sharply nudged him in the side.

He considered it a moment. He didn’t want to make the wrong decision and then realize he put his crewmates in danger. “Well, she’s very young,” he replied, “and I have no reason to believe that anything she’s told me is a lie.”

“It’s not,” she shook her head.

“You said you wanted to hitch a ride to Polus. Once we get there, you plan on leaving?”

“Well,” Yellow replied, “yes. I don’t know what I’ll do once I get there, but I’ll think of something.”

“It might be easier for you to integrate with another crew if you don’t sneak out of the ship,” Red reasoned. “We can pass you off as a member of our crew looking for a ship transfer.”

“You want us to help it infiltrate someone else’s crew?” Brown said. “Are you fucking insane?”

“Brown...” Red sighed.

“I kind of agree with him on this one. Why are we helping her kill another crew?” Lime pointed out.

Red looked at Yellow, who stared at her fingers fiddling with a piece of string she’d found on the floor. “I don’t want to kill anybody,” she said. “I just want to be left alone.” He didn’t detect any hint of a lie in her voice, which meant either she was a very good liar or she was telling the truth.

“I believe her,” he said, more for the benefit of the crew than Yellow. “But at the same time there’s something I need to say.” Yellow looked up from the string. “If you ever hurt any of my crewmates, and I don’t care if it’s because you felt like or because they were being a dick to you, I will personally eject you from this ship myself. Do you understand me?”

“I promise I won’t hurt anyone,” she nodded.

“Good. Then welcome aboard, Yellow.” He offered her a hand and helped her to her feet.

“Fucking great, now there’s two of them!” Brown said before storming off. Lime slowly slunk off after him, clearly not feeling all that great about the idea of a second impostor either. Red watched Black to see how he felt about it, and he could sense that he seemed just as wary of the idea as Brown and Lime did but was better at hiding his disapproval.

“I’ll keep a close eye on her, I promise,” he said, hoping to assuage Black’s fears. “Alright, come on,” he said to Yellow. “I have some more members of my crew to introduce you to.”

“Maybe I should come with you,” Black said. “I know that my wife is really not going to be happy about this when she finds out.”

“Wait,” Yellow said. She caught Red by the hand and stopped him from walking away. “I want to ask you something first.”

“Yes?” Red replied.

“I...I was wondering if you would mentor me.”

“Come again?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really did want to have Pink and Purple’s sex scene be a lot more explicit than it was, but because Pink is trans and I am not, I didn’t want it to come across as incredibly fetishy or offensive towards trans people. I do have trans friends, but I feel awkward asking them to read my Among Us porn to make sure I did a tasteful job, so instead I decided to just do it incredibly vague.
> 
> Here’s Pink’s profile.
> 
> Pink:  
> Real Name: Alejandro (Alex to his friends), Details: Hispanic/Spacer, 36 yo, Bisexual  
> Occupation: Cook/Retired Space Marine  
> Random Facts: Started cooking as a hobby after his stint as a space marine as a way to make friends. Has a mischievous streak, but is over all probably the one who is the most compassionate towards sad or injured crewmates. Once stole a tank off the Marine base with his military buddies and drove it to a liquor store to buy vodka.  
> Additional Notes: He’s loosely inspired by a friend of mine who is also trans and likes to play as the color pink in Among Us.


	5. Dysfunction Junction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not everyone is quick to accept Yellow into their crew. Friends and crewmates turn against each other, Red is still reluctant to mentor Yellow, and Blue is still completely oblivious to the discord he's just woken up to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A friend of mine has this headcanon that older impostors might symbolically “adopt” and teach younger impostors how to impostor, so to speak. I thought this was a cute idea, which is where the idea of them mentoring inexperienced impostors came from.
> 
> This chapter was about as long if not longer than the last one, but I cut about 3.5k words and I’m going to include them in the next part because I felt like they fit better as their own chapter. I’m looking forward to posting the next part because this chapter is full of dysfunction while in the next one, I wrote a scene so ridiculous that I had to read it to my sister and we were both laughing our asses off at it.

Red must not have heard Yellow correctly. It almost sounded like she had asked him if he would be her mentor, but that can’t be correct because he was the absolute last person who should be teaching another impostor. “Could you repeat that?”

“I was wondering if you would mentor me,” Yellow repeated. “Gray wasn’t a very good mentor.”

“So you think that I’d be better?” he asked. “You’re aware that everyone on the Skeld knows that I’m an alien, right? That’s not the mark of a good impostor!”

“Yeah, but to be fair, we didn’t know for an entire year,” Pink pointed out. “And we probably still wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been stupid and almost got my ass eaten.” Red glared at him, an obvious sign that he should stop encouraging her. “What? I’m just saying.”

“Yes, but you all thought I was weird, too! That’s not exactly blending in when everyone notices that there’s something off about me!”

“I think Lime’s weird. I never suspected him of being an impostor,” White pointed out. Red shot him a look too, but he seemed far less easily intimidated than Pink.

“You’ve also known Lime for years, so you would have known if he was an impostor by now,” Red replied.

“Please Red?” Yellow pleaded. “You’re the only other impostor around and I’m terrible at hiding. I only made it a day before the cat gave me away!”

“Okay, first of all, if you’re going to disguise yourself as someone or something that actually exists, you need to do it properly. You can’t do it in a place where you know the thing you’re disguised as is known to frequent.”

“Well I couldn’t stay in the vent! You came in after me and you would have found me!”

“Second of all, there’s a vast system of vents on this ship. Sticking to one vent is going to get you caught, especially if there’s another impostor on the ship like me.”

“So glad that Brown and Lime aren’t here to hear you giving advice on how to be a better stalker to another impostor,” Cyan said dryly. Red would have given her the same look he already gave Pink and White, but he kind of agreed with her.

“See? You already know things that I don’t!” Yellow pointed out.

“These are basic things that you should already know!” Red sighed with exasperation. “What the hell did Gray actually teach you?”

“He taught me that I was stupid and a poor hunter and no pack would ever want someone as useless as me in it,” she replied.

“Damn,” Pink said. “That’s not teaching you something, that’s just being insulting and cruel.”

Black pointed in his direction. “Exactly what he said.”

“Well that’s pretty much it. All he ever did was insult me. And sometimes he would beat me.”

It was no wonder that Yellow turned towards humans for companionship if this was how Gray treated her. Being as highly social as their species was, Yellow probably craved attention that wasn’t negative.

“I don’t need a cover at least since everyone already knows I’m an impostor, so I don’t have to pretend to be your girlfriend.”

Red cocked his head. “I’m sorry, what?”

“It was my cover for why I was always around Gray and why we needed to share a room. I pretended to be his girlfriend.”

“Share a room?” He suddenly looked worried for her. “Yellow, Gray never...did he?”

“What? No!” she shook her head when she realized what he was asking of her. “He loathed me so much that he didn’t even like touching me unless it was so he could hit me. He even made me sleep on the floor. I think he felt like I was a burden on him.”

He felt relieved and at the same time not at all. She had still been abused, just not the kind of abuse that he was assuming. “And no one ever realized something was wrong and stepped in to help you?”

“Most of them didn’t know because I didn’t tell them and the few people that did know told me I must have done something to provoke him.”

“Fuckers,” Pink said under his breath.

“I might not have been too upset when some of them got eaten,” Yellow admitted.

“Well Red, you never gave her your answer,” White pointed out.

“The answer is no.” Red turned around and started walking towards the medbay. “Now follow me, we have people who still have no idea what’s going on.”

“No?” Yellow asked. She sounded sad. “But there’s no one else I can turn to!”

“I don’t have anything to teach you, Yellow. I’m a horrible mentor. I don’t have enough experience and the only time I was ever in charge of anyone, the stupid kid got caught and had his ass thrown out an airlock because he tried to eat someone in front of people.” He started walking down the hall to the medbay figuring either she followed him or she didn’t and he’d let her decide which one she was going to do. “And before you ask, no, I have no idea why the fuck he did that. The kid always acted like no one ever fed him.”

“Red, please...”

“No I will not reconsider it. End of discussion!”

Yellow gave in, for now at least. She was aware that everyone else was following them down the hall, almost like they’d never seen an impostor before and she was some kind of novelty in an alien zoo. To be fair, maybe she was only the second impostor some of them had ever seen, and the first they’d only seen for the first time just yesterday.

When they got to the medbay, Red did not immediately walk in. “Okay, so, there are at least two people in there that will most likely be okay with the idea of you being an impostor, but the third one...”

“Green is going to chew me out over this,” Black admitted. “Let me go in first.”

“Be my guest,” Red shrugged.

White followed Black in, figuring that the more witnesses there were, the less likely that Black was going to end up being reported to MIRA as a missing person by his own wife. “Hey Molly,” they could hear Black’s voice through the door.

“You’re calling me by my real name,” Green replied. “What did you do?”

“We have another crewmate!” White said. Quick and abrupt, like ripping a bandaid off.

“Another crewmate?” This time it was Orange’s voice. “How is that...oh.”

“Oh no,” Purple could be heard saying.

“Green, put down the tray!” White shouted.

“Molly, stop!”

There was a lot of shouting and smashing around inside the medbay. None of those standing out in the hallway could see what was going on through the closed door. Pink smiled awkwardly and said, “I think this is going well, don’t you?”

Cyan pushed past them and walked through the door. Black was up against the wall trying to push Green off of him. White had his arms around her waist and was trying to pull her off, but he sounded out of breath. Being as out of shape as he was wasn’t really conducive for stopping a violent murder. Purple and Orange were both standing across the room next to Blue’s bed, wondering if they should intervene or just stay where they were.

“Just remember that these are the people in charge of us,” Red whispered to Yellow.

“This is a medbay! If you’re going to kill each other, do it in the cafeteria so I don’t have to resanitize everything!” Cyan shouted, catching their attention.

White stumbled backwards and fell over a cart and Black managed to pry his wife’s fingers from around his neck and got her off him and standing on the floor again.

Purple spotted Yellow standing in the doorway next to Red first and waved to her. “Hi! I’m Purple!”

“Hello,” Yellow said awkwardly.

She assumed that Orange didn’t realize how well she could hear him when he whispered to Purple, “She’s a lot smaller than I was expecting.”

She self consciously glanced down at her slender physique and then quickly compared herself to Red. She was a lot more slender than he was, and he was already quite thin. He was also a lot taller than her to boot, especially when he wasn’t disguised as a human since walking on his toes the way he did gave him a height boost. They were both quite small for impostors, though in her case it was her age, lack of experience, and preference for taking on the appearance of a slightly smaller than average human female that kept her on the petite side while Red just seemed to be unnaturally very tiny.

“I need to speak to you, now,” Green said. She grabbed Black and dragged him out into the hall, shoving Red as she walked past him without so much as an apology. Red nodded towards the open door and led Pink and Yellow inside.

Green didn’t even wait until they were completely down the hall to start yelling at her husband. “Are you aware what happened last time there was an impostor on the Skeld?” she demanded.

“Of course I know Molly, how would I forget that?”

“Six people fucking died, Klayton! And a kid ended up in a mental hospital!”

They couldn’t hear them anymore once they disappeared into the cafeteria and kept going, likely headed to where all official arguments seemed to be held in admin. White was staring at the floor, aware that everyone had overheard that part of the conversation.

“So, I’ll explain what happened that day later,” he said to Red. “For now, just try to pretend that everything’s completely normal and you’re just introducing a new crewmate on her first day.”

“I’m presuming that this is our impostor?” Orange asked. He gestured towards her with his hand.

“Yes. Orange, Purple, this is Yellow,” Red replied. He didn’t feel a name introduction was really all that necessary considering everyone just went off their colors anyway, but it served to make their conversation seem less awkward. “And Yellow, this is our tech guy and our engineer.”

“And who’s that?” Yellow asked.

Orange looked at his unconscious boyfriend. He’d been holding his hand since he ran to the medbay to check on him and was apparently just now realizing that he was going to have to explain a hell of a lot to Blue when he woke up.

“That’s Blue,” Red replied. He leaned closer so only she could hear him hissing at her, “And if you ever hurt him, I will kill you.”

“Is this different from the other crewmates?” Yellow asked. “Because I thought you’d space me if I hurt any of them.”

“I’ll space you if you hurt any of them, I’ll make sure your death is slow if you hurt Blue.”

She got the hint and nodded pretty quickly. Blue must have been someone special to him for him to single him out that way. Come to think of it, she just now was starting to notice that Blue smelled like her, which meant he must have scent marked him. Orange smelled a little bit like Red too, but to a much lesser extent.

“So I’m presuming the fact that we’re showing her around means that we can trust her?” Purple asked. Red said nothing. He looked at her warily. He seemed unsure of this fact yet.

“Yes we can trust her,” Pink said, “right?” Red still said nothing. Yellow hung her head in shame. He nudged him and harshly whispered, “Red, what the fuck man, you’re embarrassing her!”

“I’ll let you know when we can trust her. For now I’m keeping her on a tight leash,” Red finally replied. “Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the ship from outside of a vent.”

White looked at her and pointed out, “You know, he said ‘when’ we can trust you, not ‘if’ we can trust you.”

“I doubt he meant any distinction,” Yellow replied.

“You don’t know Red. Nothing he says is an accident.”

“Are you coming with me, or are you going to just hang out in the medbay all day?” Red shouted impatiently.

“Alright! Let’s give you a tour!” Pink said helpfully as he led her out the door. “First, you’ve already seen the cafeteria. That’s where we eat and make all our bad decisions!”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Red mumbled.

Yellow still had no idea what to feel about this crew. Red in particular was going to be a little hard for her to read.

* * *

“Lime, keep watch for Black or Green,” White ordered his friend as he walked into the bathroom and lit a cigarette. He turned on the vent to prevent the room from filling up with smoke and stood directly beneath it.

Lime stood outside the door but he didn’t say anything to White. Now it was Lime’s turn to be pissy because White had chewed him out over his recent hostility and jerkass behavior, even though Lime still insisted he was right.

“What, now you’re giving me the silent treatment too?” Lime still remained silent. “Fine then, don’t talk to me. Just remember who covers for your arse when you neglect to finish your tasks!”

He was starting to feel just about done with Lime’s childish attitude and his constant negativity all the time. Two straight days of arguing and being called a traitor by the person who was supposed to be his best friend was really starting to wear on him. He could give Brown a pass for having deep rooted psychological trauma that he never quite overcame, but Lime had never even encountered an impostor before in his life and was only going off of hearsay. He never suffered any trauma, he never lost anyone he cared about, and he’d never known the terror of being trapped on a ship knowing that one of your closest friends secretly wanted to kill you and you had no idea which one it was. White had encountered impostors twice and had seen enough of both of the extreme ends of the spectrum that they came in that he could say for certain that Red was not a threat to the rest of the crew.

He lit another cigarette, not really caring that he was probably going to die of lung cancer in his forties at this point. He was facing the wall away from the opposing air duct when he heard something crashing around inside of it like a sneaker in a clothes dryer before Red spilled out.

“Rather noisy of an entrance, don’t you think?” he asked.

“I don’t want to catch anyone by surprise when I come back out,” Red admitted. He headed straight for the utility sink and tossed his suit inside before beginning to fill it up with water. “I’m getting enough shit already from Green and Brown. I don’t need to be accused of sneaking around on top of that.”

Lime was already peering in around the corner and glaring at Red, so making as much noise as possible when he was inside the vent was probably a good idea. White had a feeling that Lime had taken a personal offense towards Red teasing him while he was stuck rather than viewing it as the joke it was meant to be taken as and he was not happy about it.

“I know you’re staring at me, Lime. Knock it off,” Red snapped without turning around. Lime hated that he literally had so many eyes everywhere. It was so creepy that he could watch him even when he wasn’t directly facing him.

“So how is our new friend?” White asked.

Red started scrubbing at the bloodstains on his suit. Luckily Blue’s blood would not show up as well if it were to stain, but he didn’t want the smears of black all over him either. “Clueless,” he replied.

“That’s a little mean, don’t you think?”

“I don’t mean it in a rude way,” Red clarified. “She seems so sheltered. There’s so much she should already know and yet she doesn’t. She’s so clueless with technology that she can’t even figure out how her tablet works and Purple had to show her. My species may be relatively tech-illiterate, but we at least know how to turn a tablet on! And the fact that she can only do cats and people?”

“Is it normal for your species to be able to take on any form they wanted in the blink of an eye?”

“Absolutely yes!” Red replied. “I can mimic any species I want within minutes of seeing it for the first time, provided I observe it enough first to figure out what it’s supposed to look like. She should at least be able to pull off more than just humans and cats by now.” He turned the water off and examined his suit, grumbling to himself when some of the stains didn’t seem to be coming off.

“Try using hydrogen peroxide to clean off blood,” Pink suggested as he and Purple pushed their way into the bathroom next.

Red cocked his head. “How would you know how to...oh.” Never mind, he figured it out.

“Oh cool, we’re smoking in here already. Now I don’t feel as weird,” Purple said before reaching into one of his pouches for something. “Can I borrow a lighter?”

“You smoke cigarettes, Purple?” White asked before tossing him his lighter.

Purple looked confused. “Oh. You’re smoking cigarettes...” he said before lighting up and filling the immediate area with a smell that most certainly did not smell like burning tobacco. White just shook his head and decided not to address it. At least this explained his work ethic.

Pink made a beeline for the soap dispenser, though they couldn’t really tell what he was doing there with his back turned. “So are we just having a party in here, or what?”

“We’re talking about the new girl,” White replied.

“It’s not a girl!” Lime said from the doorway.

“Fuck off with that, Lime!” White snapped back. Pink and Purple visibly cringed when they realized that the two must still be fighting.

“If she wants us to call her a she Lime, then she’s a girl,” Pink insisted. Lime went back to sulking just outside the bathroom.

Red reached into White’s pocket and stole a cigarette, lighting it up with the lighter that Purple still had in his hand. “It’s been a day,” he said before White could ask him when he started smoking too. “So I guess I don’t need to ask you two what you think of her.”

“I like her,” Pink replied anyway. He’d since moved away from the sink and was standing next to Purple under the vent. “But she seems really nervous.”

“You should agree to mentor her,” Purple added. “I’d hate for her to leave us at Polus and then immediately get caught.”

“Polus is overrun with shapeshifters. She can just find someone else to mentor her there,” Red pointed out. He angrily scrubbed at a large stain, trying to distract himself from the conversation of whether or not he should mentor the new impostor.

“Yeah, but you can give her a head start,” Pink replied.

“It might be a good idea to at least help her with the basics,” White replied. “I mean you admitted she’s clueless. She needs more help than most. Gray really held her back.”

“I’m not mentoring anyone, end of discussion!”

Lime had stormed into the bathroom and started yelling at Red, taking him aback. “You better fucking not teach her to be a better impostor! You’re just inviting her to kill someone!”

“I wouldn’t be showing her how to kill people, Lime! I’d be showing her how not to get caught so that people like you who judge an entire species unfairly don’t try to kill her on the spot!” Red growled.

“How are we judging your species unfairly? All your species does is infiltrate crews like the Knight and kill everyone on board!”

Red chuckled, but it sounded more like exasperation rather than him finding something funny. “I hate to break it to you Lime, but there is a very probable chance that you’ve met an impostor before ever setting foot on the Skeld and that you just don’t know it because they had no intention of killing you. Hell, you were probably friends with them.”

“I doubt it,” Lime shook his head.

“You were friends with Red,” Purple pointed out. Lime didn’t have a comeback for that.

“I believe it,” White replied. “If an impostor doesn’t have ill intentions, why would they ever identify themselves as an impostor? The reason the only ones we hear about are the ones that are killing people is because the nice ones rarely get caught.”

Red pointed at White. “What he said.”

Pink suddenly asked, “Lime, were you supposed to be standing guard at the door?”

“Oh fuck,” White mumbled.

Lime slowly turned around to a huge, looming figure standing behind him. Black was standing just inside the bathroom, staring at Purple, Red, and his own admin, White, not saying anything and just waiting until they noticed that he was standing there. He couldn’t have been there long, but he was there just long enough.

For once, Lime seemed to show a little bit of remorse. Likely because White was staring him down. “Oops...”

“Well I guess I don’t have to question why you always smell like smoke,” Black said to White. “I only have to question why my own first officer has been breaking rules lately.”

“Rules are flexible,” White replied. “Some of them should absolutely be enforced but others are okay to become lax on once in a while.” He cringed. “Right?”

“Nice try. I’ll talk to you later.”

Black left, leaving everyone wondering why he was singling out White when Purple and Red had also been smoking despite the Skeld’s firm _no smoking_ rule. White was not looking forward to the talk he’d have with him later since Black had been taking out his frustration with his wife on him since he couldn’t yell at her.

He glared at Lime and uttered, “You fucking wanker!” with intense contempt.

Red felt guilty that he’d fucked up everyone’s relationships just by existing. Lime hated White, White was frustrated with Lime, Green was fighting with Black, and Brown was probably deeply upset and disappointed with Cyan right now. He turned his head back towards the sink and pulled the drain, figuring that this was the cleanest he was probably going to get his suit. He felt a hand on his arm and almost jumped at the sudden contact.

He must have been looking conflicted because Pink reassured him, “Hey man. It’s not your fault.”

He snuffed his cigarette out in the utility sink and turned around, storming out with his dripping wet suit to find a place to hang it so it could dry. “Then why does it feel like my fault?” he asked on the way out.

“White, I’m sorry,” Lime tried to apologize.

White pushed past him, roughly brushing his arm in the process. “Don’t talk to me.”

Purple, Pink and Lime were the only ones still standing in the bathroom now, and it was kind of awkward, at least until Pink noticed that Lime was sad and extended his arms towards him in an invitation of a hug. Lime quickly accepted it.

“I’m surprised you guys don’t hate me now too,” Lime said.

“White doesn’t hate you,” Purple pointed out. “He’s just a little upset with you.”

“It sure seems like hate to me.”

“Neh. He’ll get over it. Everyone’s just a little pissed off lately,” Pink reassured him. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some business in the crew room before Brown comes down for his nap.” Why did that single statement fill Lime with suspicion? “You coming, big guy?”

Pink left the bathroom and Purple snuffed out his joint in the sink so he could follow him. Lime was now alone in the room. He gave one look to the bathroom vent, tempted to solder that one shut like he’d done with the one in the crew quarters so that Red and Yellow couldn’t use it as an entryway or exit anymore.

He ultimately decided against it.

* * *

The medbay was quiet, aside from the beeping of the machines monitoring Blue. Red had once more crawled underneath his bed and looked like he was trying to take a nap. Yellow sat on the bed furthest from Blue and just watched nervously. Orange was beside his boyfriend’s side, watching Cyan move about from place to place, trying to busy herself with anything she could to keep her mind off of things. Pink and Purple had joined them all at some point. The two of them sat side by side on the next available bed and were playing a game to pass the time. Orange wondered when they became a thing. He’d never seen them spend so much time together before. Purple especially was usually fairly solitary.

All of them looked when Blue had started stirring. He’d woken up a few times by this point and every time had muttered a disoriented, “Where am I?” before it became clear he wasn’t exactly lucid when he passed out again, only to awake later and pull the same thing. Orange gave up on trying to engage him every time and just said something completely ridiculous, to which Blue would always say, “Oh that’s nice,” and become unconscious again half a second later.

As if on schedule, Blue mumbled, “Where am I?”

“Blue, I’m so sorry,” Orange said. “You were eaten by an impostor. All that’s left of you is a head in a jar and we’re keeping you alive with a car battery. Don’t worry though, I’m going to build you a new body out of Legos.”

“What the fuck, Dillon,” Blue muttered.

Cyan stopped moving about the medbay and Pink and Purple both looked up from their game. “Oh, you’re actually awake this time?” Orange replied with a laugh. “I figured you were just going to pass out again.” Red scrambled out from under the bed and Cyan was at his side in seconds.

“Lucas!” Cyan shouted, throwing her arms around her brother, being careful not to pull out any wires or bump his arm.

“Hey buddy, we missed you!” Pink said as he and Purple got up to stand next to him as well.

“Did I die or something?” he asked, his voice sounding dizzy and disoriented. The first sight he actually registered as his brain struggled to function properly was Red at the foot of the bed in his impostor form, tentacles spread out behind him, drool dripping from the maw in his chest, and his drug addled mind instantly connected the image with that of a hungry demon. “Ah fuck, don’t tell me I’m in Hell.”

“No you didn’t die,” Orange replied. He kissed Blue and nearly smothered him with a hug. “But you could have.”

Blue was staring at Red over Orange’s shoulder. “Is it just me or is Red not wearing any clothes?”

Red started laughing, his voice sounding just distorted enough to reassure Blue that it wasn’t just him and that Red was undisguised. “A lot happened while you were unconscious, Blue,” Red finally said. “Long story short, everyone now knows I’m an impostor.”

“Who’s that?” He was squinting at the other end of the medbay where he could vaguely make out a flash of bright color. He thought it was White at first, but it didn’t look like the figure was in white.

“That’s Yellow,” Orange replied. “Our new crewmate.”

“She’s also an impostor,” Red concluded.

“Hello,” Yellow waved shyly.

All he had to say to that was, “Oh. That’s nice.” His nonchalant reaction to being told they had a new crewmate and that crewmate was an impostor made Orange laugh.

“How are you feeling?” Cyan asked.

“Like shit,” Blue replied. “I’m dizzy, I want to throw up but my stomach is empty, and my arm is almost completely numb.” He tried to flex his fingers and barely felt them move. “That’s going to wear off soon, right?”

Everyone became quiet, all of them looking at Cyan for an answer. “Well...” she replied. “Maybe yes? At least a little bit? But probably no.”

“What do you mean, probably no?” Blue replied.

“Lucas,” she said sadly. “You have nerve damage. I don’t know how bad it is yet or how much you’re going to recover but...”

“Are you saying there’s a possibility that I might never have complete feeling in my left arm again?” Blue replied. “God fucking dammit...” His voice sounded much calmer than how he must have been feeling right now.

“Don’t focus on that now,” Red interrupted. “Just focus on the fact that you’re still alive and we’re here.”

“Yeah, I’m alive, but I can’t use my arm anymore!”

Orange put a hand on him to try to calm him. “Doesn’t mean you can’t use it, it just means you’re going to have to get used to using it when you can’t feel anything anymore.” He held up his left hand to demonstrate a point. “I don’t have two of my fingers anymore, but I can still use my hand.”

“Alright, everybody take a few steps back. I don’t want my brother getting overwhelmed,” Cyan ordered everyone.

Blue looked at Red. “So you said a lot happened?”

“Uh...” Red said nervously. He looked at Orange. “Your boyfriend will tell you later.”

“For now, you need to get some rest. You lost a lot of blood and your body is still recovering from the shock,” Cyan ordered.

“Does everyone have to leave?” Blue asked sadly.

Cyan could tell that he just didn’t want to be alone right now. Processing everything while he was still heavily sedated was going to be hard on him and having someone there would definitely make him feel better. “No, as long as they maintain space and you don’t start freaking out.” She looked at Orange. “You can tell him what’s going on as long as you don’t tell him too much all at once.”

Yellow maintained a distance from Blue, though no one could figure out why. It almost seemed as though she felt guilty for what had happened to him, even though she had not been directly involved. If anything she was more guilty for luring Pink to Gray, though it had not been intentional on her part.

Orange decided to ease him into being awake by propping his tablet up on his lap and distracting him with an anime they both had been watching a few days prior. He figured once he was more awake and sobered up he could start explaining the discourse going through the Skeld’s crew right now.

Cyan had not told anyone else that Blue was awake because she didn’t want the remaining crewmates to all storm into the medbay at once, though she had sent a notification to White to at least update him on his condition that he was awake and appeared to be stable.

Green seemed to be largely unaware that there was anyone other than Cyan in the medbay right now when she stormed in looking annoyed and asked, “Hey, can I get some painkillers? I’ve got cramps that could cripple a blue whale and my husband told me that if I don’t come down here he’ll carry me himself.”

“You’ve got what?” Purple asked. Green looked like she’d just walked into an impostor nest when she realized that half the crew was hanging out in here and even Blue was awake and looking right at her.

“Purple, there’s this thing that people with vaginas do once a month where we...” Cyan started to explain.

“Cyan, I thought the werewolf thing was supposed to be a secret?” Pink interrupted.

Purple laughed when he caught on. “Oh, that. Yeah I know about that. I was married for seven years.”

Pink did a double take. “You were what now?”

“I was, but we’re divorced now. I also have a four year old daughter. You didn’t know?”

“No...because you never mentioned this to anyone before...”

“Well admittedly I don’t like talking much about my private life,” Purple shrugged. “I can show you pictures of her if you want.”

“Sure, I like kids!”

While they were distracted with their conversation, Red was watching Green, mostly because she was staring him down. He knew she’d be incredibly embarrassed if she ever realized that his heightened sense of smell meant that he could detect the hormonal changes due to her cycle right now. Speaking of which, there was another smell that he felt he had to contend to since it was more than a little important.

He watched Cyan walk into the backroom to fetch meds for Green and followed her so that he could talk to her away from the listening ears of everyone in the medbay. Green’s glare followed him as he walked past.

“So speaking of the werewolf thing, when was the last time you got yours?” he asked.

“Excuse me?” Cyan whipped her head around and glared at him. “I don’t really see how that’s any of your goddamn business, Red.”

He looked taken aback when he realized he must have made some kind of human faux pas. He’d heard woman freely offer this kind of information with each other before, sometimes in the presence of men, and thought it was okay to talk about, but apparently directly asking someone about it was not okay.

“I’m sorry. You’re right, it’s not. It’s just that earlier when I was trying to find Yellow, I noticed there’s a strange smell on you.”

“What do you mean by a strange smell?” Cyan looked like she was about to grab a scalpel off one of the medbay tables and start shanking him. He had more than a slight feeling that he was insulting her.

“Well, it’s just that the last time I noticed that a human smelled like this, it was my crewmate who got pregnant twice. I didn’t know what it was the first time, but then the second time I realized she smelled like that again and I knew it had to be related.”

“Wait, are you saying you can just smell when a woman is pregnant?”

“I can smell any hormonal changes a human body makes,” Red explained. “Fear, arousal, certain types of illness, pregnancy...it’s one of the curses of being an impostor.”

“Well I hate to break it to you, but I’m not pregnant, so you’re smelling something else.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes I’m sure. I think I would have noticed by now.”

“You’ve only just recently begun to smell like this, or I would have noticed sooner.” He started to leave the backroom and stopped to say one last thing. “It wouldn’t hurt you to take a test, would it? Worst case scenario I was wrong and it’s something else that you might need to worry about.”

Cyan was left standing in the middle of the closet area with the bottle of pills in hand, deep in thought and a shocked expression creeping on her face the more she thought about it. “Cyan! Are you okay?” she heard Green call to her.

“I’m fine. I’m coming right out,” she said as she left the backroom. _Oh my god, if he’s not wrong, Lucas is going to kill_ _Skylar_ _._

* * *

That night four of the normally occupied beds in the crew quarters were empty. Orange and Cyan opted to spend the night in the medbay with Blue now that he was awake and Red’s bed was completely empty, having been stripped of everything including pillows, blankets, and sheets so that he could take them to wherever it was he was sleeping at night.

Everyone got ready for bed in silence. No one said anything to Black when he walked in and once more took up residence in Blue’s bed without saying anything to anyone while his wife had their room all to herself. White walked in shortly afterwards and refused to even look at him or Lime. He sat down on his bed and stared into the middle distance, still in his suit, not even making an attempt to change out of it, and ignoring Lime’s attempts to get his attention.

“Why is it so quiet in here?” Purple suddenly asked.

No one immediately answered him, though Brown did jump when the cat jumped onto his bed. He stared at Lucky with suspicion until she walked across his lap and he verified that she had the normal weight of a real cat and was not just Yellow in disguise.

“Okay, you know what, I can’t take this anymore. Everyone’s acting like a dick and no one will talk to each other,” Pink said. “Tomorrow after breakfast, everyone’s meeting in the cafeteria. We all need to talk.”

“Who gave you the authority to make orders?” Lime asked.

“I’ll accept it,” Black suddenly spoke up. “Tomorrow. After breakfast. White, add that to the task list.”

White pulled out his tablet. “Sounds like a good idea to me too.” He set the task to mandatory to make sure that everyone knew they had to be there, giving Blue the only exemption. “I don’t know what you’re planning Pink, but I hope it works.”

“Alright, and on that note, I hope everyone has a pleasant night,” he said with a smile before tucking himself in.

“Was someone in my duffel bag? I always pull the zippers towards the middle, but someone has them all the way to the right,” Brown pointed out. He heard Purple trying to smother a laugh in his pillow and started to feel suspicious.

Unzipping the bag, he dug around inside of it and screamed before flinging the condom he found tied up inside across the room. It landed on Lime who then jumped up off his bunk and shouted, “Yo, what the fuck?” before tossing it at White, where it got plastered to the front of his helmet.

White just sat there looking mildly annoyed and noted that the contents had a slightly pink tint to them just before the condom unstuck itself and fell into his lap. “Guys, it’s just the cherry almond scented hand soap that’s in the bathroom dispensers,” he pointed out.

Pink and Purple couldn’t stop cackling, which gave them away and earned them both trash duty for a week, but it was worth it. On the plus side both Lime and White seemed to agree that it was actually kind of funny and they went to bed on a lighter note that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of my friends sent me a link to my previous fanfic with the caption, “This is you, isn’t it?” Gotdangit, I knew I shouldn’t have shared a few paragraphs of my robot porn with my friends on discord because now they all know my writing style...
> 
> Purple:  
> Real Name: Kosuke, Details: Japanese-Korean/Spacer, 39 yo, Pansexual  
> Occupation: Technical and Communications Engineer (“the tech guy” according to everyone else)  
> Random Facts: Is incredibly lazy and has to often be reminded three or four times to do his tasks. Is a massive nerd and tech geek. Is really shy and rarely removes his helmet. Despite being a big guy, cannot hold his alcohol. Loves cats. Has confirmed that every computer and device on the Skeld can run Doom. Has a crush on Pink. His cooking is so bad that he once fed a burrito he made to his uncle’s dog and it died a few hours later.  
> Additional Notes: Purple, along with Cyan, got shafted the most in the original fanfic since he only had one speaking line and was either sleeping or drunk in both his cameos. Ironically he actually appeared the most of any character in my drafted but discarded chapters because purple is my second favorite color after blue, making it the first color I thought of when I needed a random color to appear in a scene.


End file.
